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Lenten Sermons 

THE HOLY YEAR 



Rev. JOHN TALBOT SMITH, LL.D. 

Author of 

“ THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS,” “ THE TRAINING OF 
A PRIEST,” “BROTHER AZARIAS,” “SARANAC,” 
“A WOMAN OF CULTURE,” ETC. ” ” ll ” ” :: 



NEW YORK 

WILLIAM H. YOUNG & COMPANY 
27 Barclay Street 
1900 




TWO COPIES RECEIVED, 

Library of 

Office o f tJag 

MAR l 01900 

Kejlstor of Copyright* 

SVs ?5 

. S(,z 


60C33 

Copyright, 1900, 

BY 

JOHN TALBOT SMITH 
All rights reserved 


' f ' f \UyA , 

Vfvv!' 1 

mibil obstat: 

Remy Lafort, Censor Liborum. 


•[Imprimatur: 

* Michael Augustine, 

Archbishop of New York. 


SECOND,COPY, 
« * 




Conf cnt e 


PAGE 

The Son of God, ....... 1 

What think you of Christ? Whose Son is he ?— 
Matt. xxii. 42. 

The Fold of Christ, ..... 15 

And there shall he one fold and one shepherd.— 
John x. 16. 

The Soul of Man,.30 

What shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole 
world and lose his own soul?—Mark viii. 36. 

The Love of Our Neighbor, .44 

Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.—Mark 
xii. 31. 

The Miraculous in the Christian Life, . 58 

And it shall come to pass after this, that I will 
pour out my spirit upon all flesh ; and your sons 
and your daughters shall prophesy; your old 
men shall dream dreams, and your young men 
shall see visions.—Joel ii. 28. 


7 , &-C- 



IV 


CONTENTS. 


PAGE 

The Golden Rule of Justice, .72 

And as you would that men should do to you, do 
you also to them in like manner.—Luke vi 31. 

The Plague of Uncleanness, ... 86 

For know ye this and understand that no fornica¬ 
tor or unclean or covetous person, which is a 
serving of idols, hath inheritance in the king¬ 
dom of Christ and of God.—Ephes. v. 6. 

The Taxation of Drink, 100 

Look not upon the wine when it is *yellow, when 
the color thereof shineth in the glass it goeth 
in pleasantly. But in the end it will bite like 
a snake, and will spread abroad poison like a 
basilisk.—Prov. xxiii. 31, 32. 

The Last Hours of Christ,.114 

There is no beauty in him, nor comeliness • and 
we have seen him, and there was no sightliness, 
that we should be desirous of him : despised and 
the most abject of men, a man of sorrows, and 
acquainted with infirmity; and his look was as 
it were hidden and despised, whereupon we es¬ 
teemed him not.—Isa. liii. 2, 3. 

The Risen Christ, . 128 

Jesus came, and stood in the midst, and said to 
them: Peace be to you. And when he had said 
this, he showed them his hands and his side. 

The disciples therefore were glad, when they 
saw the Lord.—John xx. 19, 20. 


£0e JJon of (Bob. 

What think you of Christ? Whose Son is he? — Matt, 
xxii. 42 . 

OUTLINE. 

1. Particularly in the Lenten season the earnest Christian 

should ask himself this pertinent question : What do I 
think of Christ ? 

2. To the believer it seems a superfluous and an easy ques¬ 

tion, but it has puzzled many, who tried in vain to 
answer it. 

3. Sound opinion must be based on sound knowledge; to 

answer this first question well, you must answer an¬ 
other : What do you know about Jesus ? 

4. The infallible Church alone can give a clear and true ac¬ 

count of His nature, His history, and His work. 

5. As to His nature, the Church teaches that He is the God- 

Man : the Son of God and the Son of Mary. 

6. As to His history, the Church teaches that He lived and 

died like other men, but raised Himself from death, 
ascended to His Father in heaven, and will come again 
to judge mankind at the end of time. 

7. As to His work, the Church teaches that He founded her, 

and gave into her keeping the Sacraments, for the sal¬ 
vation of men. 

8. He lives now, not only in heaven, but in the bosom of 

His Church. 

9. In another sense He also lives and works in His priests 

and His people who keep His faith and observe His 
commandments. 

10. With this knowledge provided by the Church, and a 
study of one’s life, the question can be properly an¬ 
swered. 

I. The Difficulty of the Question. 

1. Men are better prepared to discuss impor¬ 
tant questions of the soul in seasons like Lent, 
because the current of life then runs toward 

1 


2 


THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 


seriousness, all Catholics are more or less af¬ 
fected by the religious solemnities of the time, 
and the very atmosphere is charged with spir¬ 
itual electricity. The shadow of the Passion 
falls over our life, the long shadow of Calvary 
embraces the whole world. The lonely figure 
which hung on the cross of Calvary is still the 
wonder and the mystery of men, as He was in 
the hour of His shame and His dying. Every 
earnest soul, seeking for the truth, or in actual 
possession of it, must at some moment of his 
career pass before the Christ nailed to the cross 
and have the solemn question put to him: 
What do you think of Jesus Christ? Whose 
Son is He? As he answers it, his future will be 
upward to heaven or downward to hell. “ Who 
will grant me that I might know and find him 
and come even to his throne?”—Job xxiii. 3. 
“He shall kiss the lips, who answereth right 
words.”—Prov. xxiv. 26. 

2. The Catholic thinks it an easy question 
to answer. He would say promptly with St. 
Peter: “ We have believed and have known that 
thou art the Christ, the Son of God.”—John vi. 
10. Yet Christ seems to have thought it a diffi¬ 
cult question in proposing it to the Pharisees. 
They thought it easy to answer, and were caught 
badly by their own response. They gave their 
opinion practically to the whole world when 
they condemned the Son of God as an impostor 


THE SON OF GOD. 


3 


and nailed Him to the cross. They had been 
studying the Messias for centuries, as the 
prophecies of the Bible revealed Him, and yet 
when He appeared among them, answering per¬ 
fectly to all that had been foretold concerning 
Him, their wits were not able to recognize Him. 
Thus has it been with innumerable souls since 
the resurrection. One teacher declared that 
Christ became the Son of God only at His bap¬ 
tism by John of the desert. Another was con¬ 
vinced that God could never condescend to put 
on human nature; therefore Christ was not a hu¬ 
man being at all, but only a phantom of human 
form, by means of which men might see with 
the eyes of the flesh the divinity. A third 
taught that He was no more than a man inspired 
by the mighty Spirit of God. A fourth declared 
that Christ was both God and man, and that 
there were two persons in Him, the divine and 
the human; God the Father claiming the one, 
and Mary the Virgin the other. In our times 
the great multitude outside the Church hardly 
know what answer to make to the question, since 
their leaders and teachers are all at sea them¬ 
selves ; but the general belief is that Christ was 
the son of Joseph and Mary, and the greatest 
genius, the noblest product of the human race. 
To this belief a few have added the circumstance 
that too much mentality had destroyed His pru¬ 
dence, and incipient insanity led to His down- 


4 


THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 


fall. With such a variety of answers recorded 
in history and visible in the lives of our very 
neighbors, it becomes clear that the question is 
not so easily answered. “And John called to 
him two of his disciples, and sent them to Jesus, 
saying: Art thou he that art to come, or look we 
for another? ”—Luke vii. 19. 

3. Before an opinion can be formed some 
knowledge of the subject in hand must be ac¬ 
quired. What do we know of Christ? It is pos¬ 
sible the Pharisees would put us to shame on 
that point, for they had studied everything that 
could give them information about Him. Their 
inability to recognize Him when He appeared 
before them and made His claim for recognition 
arose from the fact that they had formed a the¬ 
ory of His appearance, doctrines, and methods 
which did not have room for the true Son of 
God. The humble son of the carpenter, devoted 
to poverty and the preaching of the Gospel to 
the poor, scorning the wealth, the pride, the 
power of aristocracy, and relying solely on the 
power of God for the regeneration of man, was 
a far different personage from the mighty prince, 
warrior, and statesman who was, in their 
thought, to lead the Jewish nation to earthly 
glory. Their knowledge of Him was insufficient 
and incorrect. The learned men of all times 
have never agreed about Him, and the informa¬ 
tion with which they supply us leads only to 


THE SON OF GOD. 


5 


confusion. History describes Him as a wonder¬ 
worker, a teacher of great truths, a genius of the 
highest order; it records His declarations of His 
own nature, character, and mission; it follows 
the course of His ideas in the growth of Chris¬ 
tianity ; but it settles none of the questions which 
naturally rise from His teaching. There is in 
consequence a great difficulty in learning any¬ 
thing positive and conclusive about Him which 
might determine and shape individual conduct 
in His regard. How, then, are we to form an 
opinion about Him? In the general confusion 
we must remain silent; even to that most impor¬ 
tant question, whose son was He, we are at a 
loss what answer to make, if we have to depend 
upon ourselves alone. Therefore quite naturally 
we turn to that Church which He founded for 
sure and correct information. We have His 
own word that it can make no mistake regard¬ 
ing Him and His doctrine. “ The gates of hell 
shall not prevail against it.”—Matt. xvi. 18. “ I 

am with you [the Church] all days, even to the 
consummation of the world.”—Matt, xxviii. 20. 
“ And if he will not hear the Church, let him be 
to thee as the heathen and the publican.”— 
Matt, xviii. 17. “ He that heareth you, heareth 

me.”—Luke x. 16. Before forming our opinion, 
then, and accepting the paternity of Christ, let 
us hear what the Church teaches concerning 
Jesus Christ. 


6 


THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 


II. The Teaching of the Church. 

1. The learned have been unable to agree as 
to the nature and character of Christ, and have 
left only confusion behind them. “ They are all 
confounded and ashamed; the forgers of error 
are gone together into confusion.”—Isa. xlv. 16. 
Mark, then, the clearness of statement adhered 
to at all times in the declarations of the Church 
concerning her Lord. She teaches, first, as to 
His Personality, that He is the actual Son of 
the living God, the Second Person in that mys¬ 
terious Trinity which rules the universe. There 
is no ambiguity in the use of the word Son. It 
means just what it says. Christ is the actual 
Son of the true God, of the same substance as 
His Father, of the same nature, equal to the 
Father in all things. The heretics have called 
Him the Son of the Father, but like the trick¬ 
sters most of them have been, they juggled with 
the words. “ And they have bent their tongue, 
as a bow, for lies, and not for truth.”—Jer. ix. 
3. We are all the sons of God, inasmuch as He 
made us; we are doubly His children when we 
love and worship Him; and Christ was the Son 
of the Father in the highest sense, according to 
the heretics, because “ it was his meat and drink 
to do the will of him that sent him.” The 
Church does not juggle with its language. She 
teaches that Christ was the Son of God in all 


THE SON OF GOD. 


7 


that the phrase implies and contains. He was 
God as well as Man. In Him were united the 
two natures, the human and the divine. He 
honored His creatures by taking a body and a 
soul like theirs, and He took the human form in 
the womb of His sweet Mother, after the fashion 
of nature. Therefore do we understand and 
love Him the more, because He was of our race 
and fashion, a man. There was no ambiguity 
about His personality. He is one person, not 
two, as some would have Him. They made 
themselves ridiculous by such teaching, but the 
Church saved mankind from further ridicule by 
rejecting the teaching. “And you, O children 
of Zion, rejoice and be joyful in the Lord your 
God; because he hath given you a teacher of 
justice, and he will make the early and the lat¬ 
ter rain to come down to you as in the begin¬ 
ning.”—Joel ii. 23. 

2. The Church teaches, in the second place, 
that He lived, suffered, and died as a man lives, 
suffers, and dies. Christ was not a phantom, 
nor a senseless rock, which went through the 
actions of life without feeling of joy or of pain, 
simply to make an impression on His fellows. 
He was flesh and blood, His sorrows were deep 
and bitter, and His tears were the brine that 
affliction forces from the broken hearts of men. 
He accepted the circumstances of His life with 
resignation; its obscurity, its brevity, its con- 


8 THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 

eluding glory, and its mournful shame, the 
shame of the cross; and He accepted also, 
which is hardest for all of us, the accompany¬ 
ing pain and shame which His unhappy fate 
brought to His Mother and His friends. He 
died in wretchedness, because the law of sin so 
ordained it; the pride of man always crucifies 
the force that would destroy that pride. He 
died on the cross because the leader of the hu¬ 
man race, which finds death its greatest cross, 
was to turn death into a resurrection, where be¬ 
fore it meant extinction. “ There is no beauty 
in him, nor comeliness; and we have seen him, 
and there was no sightliness, that we should be 
desirous of him; despised, and the most abject 
of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with 
infirmity.”—Isa. liii. 2, 3. The Church teaches 
in the face of the wrangling crowd that within 
three days of His death the God-Man raised 
Himself by His own power to life again, and for 
forty days displayed Himself to His disciples 
that they might have no doubt of His resur¬ 
rection from death to everlasting life. He de¬ 
stroyed the mystery which up to that time had 
hung about death. He revealed and made clear 
the reality of the life after death, the existence 
of heaven. He returned to His Father from the 
actual presence of His disciples, after assuring 
them that He would come again to judge the 
world. 


THE SON OF GOD. 


9 


3. In the third place, the Church teaches, as 
to His work, that Christ founded the Church be¬ 
fore He left the earth, and gave into her charge 
the seven Sacraments, for the earthly comfort 
and the heavenly glory of mankind. "Having 
loved his own, who were in the world, he loved 
them unto the end.”—John xiii. 1. He would 
not leave His followers to the wolves of passion 
and of injustice, to be torn from without and 
within. He was determined that to the end of 
time each soul that loved Him, no matter how 
remote in time or place from Judea of the first 
century, should be in constant and loving com¬ 
munication with Himself through His glorious 
Church and His wonderful Sacraments. How 
He accomplished this we all know from our own 
experience. From the cradle to the last limit of 
purgatory the Church has guarded her children; 
from youth to death they have been fed on the 
body and blood of Christ. Under the injustices 
of sinners they have been taught to be patient, 
even until the judgment, in the firm faith that 
Christ will render justice to the wrongers and 
the wronged. Such in brief is the teaching of 
the Church with regard to the Christ. How 
clear, how complete, how beautiful, how con¬ 
sistent is this exposition of the nature and life of 
the Lord, when viewed by itself! But how it 
rises to the heights of heaven in sublimity, when 
we compare it with the numberless expositions 


10 THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 

of the shouting mob outside the Church; the 
mob of all the centuries, theologians and philos¬ 
ophers, scientists and litterateurs, demagogues, 
charlatans, popular preachers, and madmen, 
who recall the words of Christ: “Beware of 
false prophets, who come to you in the clothing 
of sheep, but inwardly they are ravening 
wolves.”—Matt. vii. 15. “For there shall arise 
false Christs and false prophets, and shall show 
great signs and wonders, insomuch as to deceive 
(if possible) even the elect. Behold I have told 
it to you beforehand. If therefore they shall 
say to you: Behold he is in the desert; go ye 
not out: Behold he is in the closets, believe it 
not.”—Matt. xxiv. 24-26. 

III. The Ever-Living Christ. 

1. Our knowledge of Christ would be incom¬ 
plete if we were not also able to tell where He 
is at the present moment. The mere question 
raises a babble of voices. The false teachers 
and their following cry out that His ashes have 
long ago mingled with the blessed earth of Pales¬ 
tine, and His memory alone lives. The sects of 
Protestantism cry out that He lives under each 
of their ever-increasing and nebulous creeds. 
He is not with them, the squirming scissions of 
ancient heresy. The clear voice of the Church 
rises over the din of the charlatans: “ Behold 


THE SON OF GOD. 


11 


I am with you all days, even to the consumma¬ 
tion of the world.”—Matt, xxviii. 20. In the 
beginning He founded the Church, He declared 
her the mistress of the nations, and He has kept 
His promise to guard her from error, from de¬ 
cay, from death, and to remain with her forever. 
The calm, unprejudiced eye of good sense looks 
from this majestic Church standing on the hill¬ 
tops of time, to the kicking, sprawling, roaring 
heretics building mud-hovels on the plain be¬ 
low, and calling them the everlasting temples of 
Christ. If there be an everlasting Christ, de¬ 
cides the unreligious observer, He lives and 
works in the Church of Rome. It is the inev¬ 
itable conclusion. Christ is with His Church 
in this century, as in the first. He dwells, as 
we know, on her altars, and lives in daily asso¬ 
ciation of the most loving kind with His chil¬ 
dren. Wherever the Church is, there is the 
Christ. “ Father, I will that where I am, they 
also whom thou hast given me may be with 
me.”—John xvii. 24. 

2. He is also to be found wherever His faith¬ 
ful priest preaches His Gospel to man. “ As 
thou hast sent me into the world, I have also 
sent them into the world.”—John xvii. 18. The 
priest is His representative, and he carries with 
him the credentials of the Christ. From his 
hands the wonderful Sacraments spring into life 
and fill souls with courage, light, joy, and resig- 


12 THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 

nation. At his word sin flies, and the peace of 
God enters wearied hearts. He is indeed an¬ 
other Christ. His presence and his work bring 
the Church into each household and into each 
heart that receives him. St. Patrick fills Ireland 
with light and joy, St. Francis Xavier illumines 
and glorifies distant Japan, St. Vincent de Paul 
sets France and the world on fire with charity. 
What these great priests accomplished on a 
grand scale, the priest of the mission repeats for 
his little flock. And the people recognize in 
him the true representative of the Lord. They 
seek him out in all their trials and make him 
carry part of their burdens. He is at their side 
in all the trying moments of life: in the sick¬ 
room, in the death-chamber, comforting the 
broken heart, healing many wounds, bringing 
back the wayward child, stirring up the slow 
and feeble, pointing always to that heaven which 
is the harbor of earth’s pilgrimage. Thus we 
have the Christ, not only in the Church, not 
only on our altars in person, veiled by the bread 
and wine, but moving about amongst us daily, 
scattering the blessings of grace everywhere, de¬ 
lighting us by his human sympathies, and taking 
from the loneliest souls the keenness of desola¬ 
tion, in the fact that one friend has a personal 
interest in them for the sake of the loving 
Christ. “ Say to Aaron and his sons: Thus shall 
you bless the children of Israel, and you shall 


THE SON OF GOD. 


13 


say to them: The Lord bless thee and keep thee. 
The Lord shew his face to thee, and have mercy 
on thee. The Lord turn his countenance on 
thee, and give thee peace.”—Num. vi. 23-26. 

3. In conclusion, Christ may also be said to 
be wherever any child of His carries on the good 
fight against the forces of sin and error. “ Know 
you not that you are the temple of God, and that 
the spirit of God dwelleth in you? ”—1 Cor. iii. 
16. Every true Christian is the representative 
of Christ to all men, inasmuch as the life of 
Christ shines through his. Now, with all that 
has been taught us by Christ and His Church 
concerning His nature, history, and work, we are 
prepared to answer the question asked at the 
beginning: What think you of Christ? Whose 
Son is He? Faith has taught us that He is the 
Son of God. We have no doubt on that point, 
because the Church has so declared. But what 
do you think of the Christ? It is not enough 
to say promptly : I believe He is the Son of God. 
The lips are indeed ready, but how does your 
daily conduct match the declaration of faith 
made by the lips? Does that conduct declare as 
clearly as your lips that you believe Christ to 
be the Son of God? For example, Luther de¬ 
clared the divinity of Christ while engaged in 
destroying the only witness to that divinity in 
the world, the Church. The man of business, so 
wrapped up in money-making that he forgets 


14 THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 

religious duties, family duties, and the poor, 
believes with his lips, but has little belief in his 
heart. So every sinner may cry loudly his be¬ 
lief in Christ, while his sins flatly contradict 
his words. Because to believe in Christ truly, 
to accept Him as the Son of God, means that you 
accept the truth of His teachings, the necessity 
of their daily use, the certainty of all their con¬ 
sequences. Your life must speak more loudly 
than your lips that you believe in the Christ. 
"Not every one that saith to me, Lord, Lord, 
shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he 
that doth the will of my Father who is in heaven, 
he shall enter into the kingdom of heaven.”— 
Matt. vii. 21. This question is asked of every 
man at least once in his life. It will be asked 
once again in judgment, and the record of our 
lives will be the answer, which will tell all heaven 
what we have thought of the Christ. Let no 
one be so foolish as to wait for judgment to 
make the first practical answer. “For what 
shall I do when God shall rise to judge? And 
when he shall examine, what shall I answer 
him? ”—Job xxxi. 14. At the supreme moment 
we cannot remain silent before our Judge; we 
must be able to cry out with Peter: “ We have 
known and have believed that thou art Christ, 
the Son of God. ” 


m sofb of const. 

And there shall be onefold and one shepherd.—John x. 16 . 
OUTLINE. 

1. At this moment, as at the beginning of her history, the 

Church shows the same elements of organization. 

2. She outlives leaders, theories, systems, governments, 

races, and nations, yet keeps the beauty and vitality 
of youth. 

3. Christ founded her to deal with all mankind in the mat¬ 

ter of salvation. 

4. Therefore the Church is visible, universal, and indefecti¬ 

ble. 

5. She is a spotless unity, having authority, infallible and 

invincible. 

6. To belittle her before men, false teachers ridicule the 

ideas of church and creed. 

7. For the same purpose they teach that one church is as 

good as another, and that the Church of Christ is in¬ 
visible. 

8. And they decry the priesthood of man as an affront upon 

the dignity of man’s nature. 

9. Their sophistries ruin individuals, but affect the Church 

nothing, which is to-day as strong and beautiful as when 
first she became the bride of Christ. 


I. The Church’s History. 

1. Two things are remarkably clear in the 
history of the true Church of Christ. The first 
is that her organization is essentially the same 
now as on the day of Pentecost. Look into the 
upper room in Jerusalem, where sat Mary, Pe¬ 
ter and the other apqstles, and many of the 


16 THE CHAPLAIN'S SERMONS. 

disciples, breathing the sacred fire of the Holy 
Spirit, and speaking in divers tongues of the 
wonderful works of God. What do we behold? 
Peter, the first Pope; John, Janies, and the rest, 
the first bishops; the disciples of Christ, the 
first Christians; and Mary, the honored and be¬ 
loved Mother of God, now mother and guardian 
of this new household of the Church, as she had 
been of the lovely household of Galilee. Look 
over the world at this moment for the modern 
counterpart of this first body of Christians, this 
earliest form of the Church, and where do you 
behold it? Only in that great organization 
whose head is the Pope, the successor of St. 
Peter; whose leaders are the bishops in strict 
and loving communion with the Pope; whose 
people are the millions confessing the Christ; 
whose beloved mistress is Mary the Mother of 
God. Contrast with that group in the upper 
chamber the wriggling sects of the Christian 
world, who are all shouting the name of Christ 
in different tones, and you find them rejecting 
Peter to worship Paul, or condemning the lead¬ 
ership of the apostles as an invention of the 
devil, or ready to curse the very name of the 
Mother of God. They have not a single feature, 
not an accidental likeness, which would bring 
them into relationship with the Church of the 
first Pentecost. “But there were also false 
prophets among the people, even as there shall 


THE FOLD OF CHRIST. 


17 


be among you lying teachers, who shall bring 
in sects of perdition, and deny the Lord who 
bought them; bringing upon themselves swift 
destruction.”—2 Peter ii. 1. 

2. The second clear fact in the history of the 
Church is her endurance through the ages. 
With what pride and comfort the heart of faith 
glows when this wonderful victory over change 
and time and trial rises like a sun before the 
mind! Its glory confounds all her enemies and 
fills them with humiliation. Greece and Rome 
are gone, the old races have disappeared with 
their governments, with their ideas, philoso¬ 
phies, arts, sciences. Charlemagne and his 
empire are dust, new nations have taken the 
places of the old; Arius and the heresiarchs and 
their errors are mere names of history; Luther 
is denied by his children in all except insensate 
hatred of the Church; and still the Church is 
living. “ They shall perish but thou remainest: 
and all of them shall grow old like a garment: 
and as a vesture thou shalt change them, and 
they shall be changed. But thou art always the 
self-same, and thy years shall not fail.”—Ps. ci. 
27, 28. The face of the world has been made 
over many times by the shifting of races and 
the schemes of statesmen; the ideas of men 
have swung from one end of the pendulum to the 
other again and again; all sorts of remedies for 
evil and recipes for happiness have been recom- 
2 


18 THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 

mended and tried, in place of the old remedy, 
grace, and the old recipe, the love and service 
of Christ; and the old Church has looked upon 
them all as the sun looks upon the clouds of 
morning. The heaviest and darkest and strong¬ 
est of them have been at most only a little dust 
and vapor. Her calm face looks down upon us 
to-day without contempt for our littleness, with 
only pity for the present makers of clouds and 
rain. All that she knew and loved and pitied 
in her youth have passed into nothingness, while 
she remains young in beauty and vitality, as 
strong, as fleet, as active, as productive, as lov¬ 
ing as in the far-off days when her womb gave 
to the world Francis of Assisi and Teresa of 
Spain. “And the Gentiles shall walk in thy 
light, and kings in the brightness of thy rising. 
Lift up thy eyes round about and see: all these 
are gathered together, they are come to thee: 
thy sons shall come from afar, and thy daugh¬ 
ters shall rise up at thy side.”—Isa. lx. 3, 4. 

II. Her Characteristics. 

1. The questions naturally provoked in be¬ 
liever and unbeliever alike by this grand insti¬ 
tution are related to the qualities which have 
given the Church such endurance and such 
power. What are her characteristics? What 
are her powers? The faithful know that they 


THE FOLD OF CHRIST. 


19 


are not human, but divine, the gift of Christ to 
His bride. He founded the Church to embody, 
teach, and enforce the truths of man’s nature 
and destiny, just as men found a society to sup¬ 
ply the needs of the social man, and to enable 
him to fulfil his destiny on earth. As men by 
their nature deal only with men, with the con¬ 
crete, even where the object of their dealing may 
be abstract, immaterial, and spiritual things, 
Christ founded His Church upon a man. 
“ Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build 
my Church.” His Church is a society of men, 
with officers, offices, rules; and men can deal 
with them as consciously and as successfully 
as with any civic organization. Pope, congre¬ 
gation, cardinal, bishop, and priest are visible, 
approachable; when a man has dealt with the 
Church, he can swear to it in court, and the 
court will accept his declaration, since all men 
know of the existence of the Church of Rome. 
“ And thy gates shall be open continually: they 
shall not be shut day nor night, that the strength 
of the Gentiles may be brought to thee, and 
their kings may be brought.”—Isa. lx. 11. He 
has not been dealing with the angels, nor with 
the spirits of the vast deep, nor with the abstrac¬ 
tions of philosophers. Christ made the matter 
of dealing with Himself possible for all ages, for 
all circumstances, for all peoples. He is easier 
of access than any monarch or ruler, and His 


20 THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 

children can approach Him with more familiar¬ 
ity and ease than the children use in dealing 
with their human father. Keeping this fact in 
mind, it will be easy to understand and appre¬ 
ciate the qualities with which the Saviour en¬ 
dowed the Church. “ Thou shalt no more have 
the sun for thy light by day, neither shall the 
brightness of the moon enlighten thee: but the 
Lord shall be with thee for an everlasting light, 
and thy God for thy glory.”—Isa. lx. 19. 

2. First of all, the Church is visible. That 
quality can be appreciated better when we see 
the hole in which the Protestant sects are living 
to-day, for lack of any one organization among 
them with power to speak for all the scissions 
of the Lutheran heresy. You can deal with the 
Anglicans, the Episcopalians, the Methodists, 
and so on down the list, but you cannot find any 
corporate existence of the thing called Protes¬ 
tantism. Its leaders have tried to explain the 
unhappy condition by making the entire Church 
an invisibility, but this has not worked well in 
the cold, hard world; and the contrast with the 
visible Church of Christ has lost to heresy many 
an adherent and gained souls to Christ. Not 
only is the Church visible to the human eye; 
she is also universal. The earth is her heritage, 
and her apostles never lost any time in claiming 
and working her estate. From the days of the 
tireless St. Paul to this day of Dom Bosco the 


THE FOLD OF CHRIST. 


21 


Church has had her representatives among all 
peoples. At this moment there is no country 
outside the pale of her influence, there are no 
missions like her missions, and heresy has to 
face her legions, no matter how strongly en¬ 
trenched it may be. With the characteristics 
of visibility and universality goes that of inde- 
fectibility. She can never fail, she has never 
failed to this hour. Two thousand years old 
almost, and her beauty is that of the immortals, 
her perfection celestial, her force divine. How 
beautiful is she in herself, and how beautiful in 
contrast with the new and limited creeds that 
contort themselves out of any shape in the vain 
effort to imitate her beauty, age, and power! 
They are the sport of the intelligent and the 
learned in these foolish attempts toward a great¬ 
ness which error can never attain even in the 
lower form of simulation. “ And Moab shall be 
a derision, and an example to all round about 
him.”—Jer. xlviii. 39. 

3. There is no germ of disintegration in the 
Church, no stain of death. She is spotlessness 
and unity. It is well for the sinners of earth 
that an end comes soon to tlieir sinning, lest they 
turn out monsters. Immortality is the gift only 
of the sinless. The seed of death, begotten of 
sin, was in the old nations. They have all 
passed away. Sin has never soiled the Church, 
and she lives forever. Her unity is such that the 


22 THE chaplain’s sermons. 

Catholic is never at a loss in dealing with her, 
no matter in what part of the world he may hap¬ 
pen to be. Like the different nationalities who 
heard the first sermon of the first Pope, and 
heard each his own language, Catholics of all 
tongues can assist at the sacrifice of the Mass 
and therein worship the same Lord, can receive 
the Sacraments and live in active communion 
with their brethren of any race. The Church 
possesses real authority and exercises it. She 
is not bound by the prejudices of nations or in¬ 
dividuals, since she is above them all. Her 
laws are obeyed, her bishops and priests are 
respected and reverenced, her doctrines are the 
support of civilization, and her moral and spir¬ 
itual powers are the prop of modern govern¬ 
ments. She is infallible in her teachings, and 
can make no mistake in the instruction with 
which she provides the people. The great her¬ 
etics laughed at her infallibility one after an¬ 
other, from Arius to Luther; and from Julian 
to Voltaire the great sceptics have foretold her 
destruction. “ The kings of the earth stood up, 
and the princes met together, against the Lord, 
and against his Christ.”—Ps. ii. 2. She buried 
them and their doctrines and sneers, and is still 
found teaching the same doctrines with ancient 
vigor, as if Arius, Luther, Julian, and Voltaire 
had never been. For she is invincible. She 
had to be. All men in turn have fought her, and 


THE FOLD OF CHRIST. 


28 


the bitterest enemies have been found among 
her own children. She has had to defend the 
truth, to enforce the truth, to defend the help¬ 
less against the strong, to build up modern so¬ 
ciety and then maintain it against itself. The 
fight would have been too much for any institu¬ 
tion less than divine. Regard the long line of 
heroes, monarchs, statesmen, geniuses, who in 
turn sought to destroy her, to use her as their 
tool. They are gone “ like the dust, which the 
wind driveth from the face of the earth.”—Ps. 
i. 4. They are dust and ashes; and she lives, 
still invincible, still universal, still infallible, a 
spotless unity. “ For thou hast maintained my 
judgment and my cause: thou hast sat on the 
throne, who judgest justice.”—Ps. ix. 5. 

III. The Tricks of Her Enemies. 

1. Her enemies have been unable to destroy 
her by force in the past; therefore in our times 
they try to destroy her by trickery. “ And they 
that sought evils to me spoke vain things, and 
studied deceits all the day long.”—Ps. xxxvii. 
13). In pompous and fiery language they ridi¬ 
cule the ideas of church and creed, and declare 
that man is by nature above the littleness of 
such things. It is a boast with them now that 
they are larger than the creeds, and accept a 
church only in so far as it appreciates them. 


24 THE chaplain’s sermons. 

This is correct and fitting language, while they 
apply it to the churches and creeds of the sects. 
Certainly man is above the narrowness of their 
limits, and superior to their errors, which only 
hinder his progress and cloud his happiness. 
They are the mushrooms of a night. The old¬ 
est of the sects is still younger than the day-old 
infant, for their doctrines take on a new mean¬ 
ing every sunrise. But the Church of Christ 
and its creed are the noblest and oldest things 
in the modern world. Both have the majesty 
of their origin, which is divine; and both enjoy 
the distinction of a long history, of having with¬ 
stood the severest tests which time and malice 
can bring against the truth. “ And there shall 
be a firmament on the earth on the tops of moun¬ 
tains, above Libanus shall the fruit thereof be 
exalted: and they of the city shall flourish like 
the grass of the earth.”—Ps. lxxi. 16. The 
Church is a society of human beings, and its 
aims, its principles of action, its convictions, 
are expressed in its creed. The United States 
is a society, and its creed is a collection of doc¬ 
uments embracing the Declaration of Indepen¬ 
dence and the Constitution. We do not hear 
many Americans boasting of their superiority 
to their country or being above its creed. 
When they arrive at that point of scorn it is 
time for them to sever connection with America 
and seek elsewhere for their ideals. But they 


THE FOLD OF CHRIST. 


25 


do not mean wliat they say. Finding it impos¬ 
sible to shake this grand edifice of the old 
Church, and beyond hope to equal or to imitate 
it, they attack it in its very essence by a pre¬ 
tence of spiritual grandeur in rejecting little 
things like churches and creeds. “And their 
days were consumed in vanity, and their years 
in haste.”—Ps. lxxvii. 33. 

2. For a similar reason they are loud in de¬ 
claring that one church is as good as another. 
They do not accept this statement for their own 
favorites among the sectarian churches, since 
few Anglicans consider the Dissenters their 
equals; the Episcopalians frown upon the Meth¬ 
odists, the Methodists feel much above the 
Shakers, and the Shakers keep far away from 
the rest of the world. What is really meant by 
the phrase, one church is as good as another, is 
that any little miserable offshoot of heresy, 
born this week, as well as the greater offshoots, 
is as good as the sublime Church of Christ. 
“ They have spoken against me with deceitful 
tongues.”—Ps. cviii. 3. No one ventures to put 
it so plainly, because men smile at such claims. 
What! the shifty thing called Anglicanism, con¬ 
fined to England and begotten by Henry VIII., 
equal to the structure reared upon the rock of 
Peter! The roaring Salvation Army, the lively 
and howling children of John Wesley, the cast- 
iron Presbyterians, all born within a century or 


26 THE chaplain’s sermons. 

two, limited to one or two races and tile con¬ 
fines of a state, are compared with this majestic 
Mistress of time and place and history! The 
absurdity of the claim is relieved by its humor; 
for we cannot be angered, we can laugh heartily, 
when the milkweed shoulders the oak of Phara- 
mond and talks of one tree being as good as 
another. A subtler form of the same trick is 
the common declaration of the sects that Christ 
is the invisible Head of the invisible Church; 
that this invisible Church is one, holy, univer¬ 
sal, indefectible, and so on, although its mani¬ 
festation in one thousand sects is hopelessly 
divided and still dividing, often unholy, never 
universal, and ready to vanish at any time. 
“ They have sharpened their tongues like a ser¬ 
pent; the venom of asps is under their lips.”— 
Ps. cxxxix. 4. Unable to imitate the true Church 
in her majestic and visible unity, the clever 
theologians invented the myth called the invis¬ 
ible Church, of which the sects, like the under 
side of a tapestry, are supposed to be the wrong 
side. This is poetic and also humorous, but is 
rarely thought of by the average soul when he 
turns from the ever-multiplying sects to contem¬ 
plate the universal magnificence of the Church 
of Christ. 

3. Finally, in their lofty scorn of Church, 
creed, unity, and visibility the enemies of the 
Church include the ministry of the priesthood. 


THE FOLD OF CHRIST. 


27 


They would not stoop to receive the grace of God 
from the hands of men like themselves; in 
which point their feelings can be reciprocated. 
They would not lower the nature given them by 
God by receiving the sacraments, or any minis¬ 
tration of grace, from the hands of men. They 
go further, and would decline them from the 
angels. They do not believe that Christ could 
ever have dreamed of raising mere men to the 
heights seized by Pope, prelate, and priest. 
No, a thousand times, no! Christ alone is 
worthy to deal out His grace to men. He alone 
is the minister; and He made man of such dig¬ 
nity that only God can worthily serve so exalted 
a nature in the matter of salvation. They for¬ 
get that man is ministered to chiefly by men, 
and takes very kindly to the service. They 
themselves did not reject their mother’s milk, 
nor their father’s bread, nor the nurse’s care; 
they have cheerfully availed themselves of the 
lawyer’s skill, and the physician’s; they may 
have often welcomed a banker’s mediation; they 
have accepted their release from judges with 
joy, and bowed to back-breaking before the 
lords of the earth. Their own gospel was ac¬ 
cepted from Henry VIII., Martin Luther, John 
Wesley, John Knox, and others; and they claim 
to have received most of it from Peter and the 
other apostles. The baptism which most of 
them have rejected was once accepted from 


28 


THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 


the hands of ministers who believed it to be a 
sacrament. Why, then, should it be beneath 
human dignity to receive the ministration of a 
priesthood? Alas! here is another trick by 
which they hope to bring down the famous 
Catholic priesthood, so strong, so beautiful, so 
invincible, to the level of the preachers. What 
they cannot become they decry. The trick is 
of a piece with the others. “ Woe unto them, for 
they have gone in the way of Cain; and after the 
error of Balaam they have for reward poured 
out themselves, and have perished in the con¬ 
tradiction of love.”—Jude i. 11. 

4. Heresy changes and dies only to be suc¬ 
ceeded by fresh heresy. A new and fanciful 
theory is often preferred to the old truth. It 
has been so from the beginning. Yet one would 
think that man had enough sense left in him 
after centuries of experience to appreciate on 
human grounds alone the great Church towering 
over the past and the present. It is the one 
work, man having a share in it, which has sur¬ 
vived the cataclysms that destroyed all institu¬ 
tions of ancient times. It remains a living and 
tremendous force in the world. Only the few 
acknowledge its present power and past service. 
Through prejudice or hatred the multitude of 
intelligent people outside the Church forget 
that this force made the civilization of to-day. 
Therefore we, the faithful children of the 


THE FOLD OF CHRIST. 


29 


Church, must make up by our devotion for the 
harshness of our brethren. It is not the beau¬ 
tiful age, nor the undimmed splendor, nor the 
magnificent history of our holy Mother that 
wins our hearts; but rather are we won by the 
tenderness of this dear bride of the Christ. 
Never was bride so sweet and pure, never was 
mother so tender. We can pity our separated 
brethren for the misfortune which has deprived 
them for centuries of her care. They have felt 
the deprivation, poor orphans, without knowing 
its cause; but at this moment we can hear their 
piteous cry for that unity of belief and custom 
which fulfils the promise of Christ, that there 
shall be one fold and one shepherd. Their 
desolation has reached its climax, and we can 
hope that the morning dawns when the holy 
Mother will gather all her lost children to her 
bosom. “And I John saw the holy city, the 
new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven 
from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her 
husband. And I heard a great voice from the 
throne saying: Behold the tabernacle of God 
with men, and he will dwell with them and they 
shall be his people, and God himself with them 
shall be their God. And God shall wipe away 
all tears from their eyes; and death shall be no 
more, nor mourning, nor crying, nor sorrow 
shall be any more, for the former things are 
passed away.”—Apoc. xxi. 2-4. 



% lie JJouf of (Jttcrn. 

What shall it profit a man , he gain the whole world and 

lose his own soul f—Mark viii. 36. 

OUTLINE. 

1. Has man an immortal soul? is the great question of the 

time. The answer of the sages. 

2. The teaching of the Church on the same question. 

3. The freethinkers declare that man can never be persuaded 

of his immortality, and give powerful illustrations of 
their contention. 

4. Nevertheless this doctrine is the basis of modern civili- 

zati on, and informs every part of it. 

5. The glory which the immortal soul sheds upon the earth¬ 

ly life of man. 

6. That earthly life should be one grand preparation for 

eternity. 

7. Yet thousands train their souls as if eternity were a 

potato-field. 

8. They fight and die for prizes which dead hands cannot 

hold, which must go to others. 

9. Thus they provide infidels with arguments against the 

true nature and awful dignity of the human soul. 


I. The Natuee of the Soul. 

1. It appears that the number of those who 
deny the human soul immortality is increasing, 
and as a consequence the question of immortal¬ 
ity becomes very important. It is discussed in 
the fields and the workshops by the most igno¬ 
rant, and by the most learned in the salons of 



THE SOUL, OP MAN. 


31 


the world. So closely does it touch the inter¬ 
ests and the feelings of each man that it has 
always been a question of profound charm. Are 
we only higher animals, whose destiny is ful¬ 
filled on this planet, or have we here only the 
threshold of a career which brings man to the 
dignity of the immortals? "Son of man, dost 
thou think these bones shall live? And I an¬ 
swered: O Lord God, thou knowest.”—Ezech. 
xxxvii. 3. The sages of ancient times, like Soc¬ 
rates and Plato, the poets of the early nations, 
and the prophets of the Hebrews, all declared 
their belief or opinion or hope in a life beyond 
time, where man might lead an existence suited 
to his ideals and his desires. Christ, consider¬ 
ing Him merely as the Sage of sages, crowned 
their declarations by His plain teaching that 
the soul is immortal, that earth is nothing com¬ 
pared to heaven, that eternity holds everlasting 
dwellings for the just and the unjust. The 
noblest and wisest teachers of mankind have 
favored or held the doctrine of the eternal life. 
“ And you shall know that I am the Lord, when 
I shall have opened your sepulchres, and shall 
have brought you out of your graves, O my 
people.”—Ezech. xxxvii. 13. 

2. Eeason teaches us much concerning the na¬ 
ture of man, but without the revelation of Christ, 
contained in His own utterances and the teach¬ 
ings of the Church, our knowledge of the matter 


32 


THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 


would be confused and uncertain. It is inter¬ 
esting, therefore, to learn precisely what the 
Church teaches of man’s nature. Every child 
acquainted with the catechism learns that man 
is a creature composed of a body and a soul, 
made to God’s likeness; and that this likeness 
rests on his faculties of understanding and free 
will, and his quality of immortality. Man is 
endowed with a memory which has not its like 
on earth; and no other animal even approaches 
him in the grandeur of that faculty. He has an 
understanding which explores the heights of 
heaven and the depths of hell, which removes 
him almost entirely out of the class animal, and 
enables him to reach even to the infinite. He 
has a free will which enables him to control all 
his actions and to direct them at his pleasure; 
it frees him from the slavery of instinct, pas¬ 
sion, appetite, and environment. He shows 
his immortal nature by his longings for things 
which neither his own nature nor the earth con¬ 
tains. He seems to be satisfied with nothing 
less than the eternal and infinite God. His 
faculties are far superior to the needs of his 
earthly condition; and therefore the material¬ 
ists have found it necessary to deny that he pos¬ 
sesses free will, understanding, and memory, as 
Catholics understand these things. The ani¬ 
mals have just enough will, memory, and under¬ 
standing to live their small lives. The Chris- 


THE SOUL OF MAN. 


33 


tian asserts that man has infinitely more than 
he uses or can use in earthly living. The free¬ 
thinkers have the trouble of proving Catholics 
to be wrong. The Church opposes all their dec¬ 
larations with the simple and comprehensive 
statement that man is like to God. What a de¬ 
lightful and uplifting doctrine: that the children 
are like the father, and must go to Him for the 
long sweet days of eternity! “ What is man that 
thou art mindful of him? or the son of man that 
thou visitest him? Thou hast made him a little 
less than the angels, thou hast crowned him with 
glory and honor; and hast set him over the 
works of thy hands. ”—Ps. viii. 5, 6. 

3. Of this you can never persuade the human 
race, cry the freethinkers. Look at the history 
of the world, past and present; what wars, sedi¬ 
tions, massacres, crimes, turmoils, labors, whose 
present clamor fills the heaven; and what has 
been their object? To gain heaven? Rather to 
gain hell, if there be such a place! Take such 
a case as Napoleon’s. He is a fair instance of 
the average genius. He had the faith of the 
Catholic in his youth, but his genius led him to 
empire and St. Helena rather than to the moral 
life and a holy ending. Take the average young 
man of any time, and consider his life in the 
very face of Christian training. Lust and drink 
mark his youth, and money-making his matur¬ 
ity and age. He is steadied only by marriage, 
3 


34 THE chaplain’s sermons. 

or ambition, or interest, or an injection of good 
sense, or by human love, but he is rarely influ¬ 
enced by the idea of immortality. Heaven is 
strange to him; he fears death as the end of all, 
and would willingly live while life has pleas¬ 
ures. In health and prosperity few men care 
much for the immortality of the Christians. 
Why? Because it is only a fiction of the 
priests, has no place in the scheme of existence, 
and therefore no influence naturally on man’s 
mind. A better explanation is, perhaps, that 
immortality seems too good to be true, and too 
far off to be of immediate importance. But the 
freethinker is more promptly answered by in¬ 
viting him to a second look at the history of the 
past and the present. Behold the wise and the 
good of all ages, the holy ones of Israel, the 
clean of heart in all ages; account for Peter and 
John, Augustine, Benedict, Francis, Columbus, 
Washington; explain the hermits, monks, and 
nuns of each age, the Crusaders, the millions of 
faithful Christians; interpret the growth of the 
Church, the sending out of missionaries into 
dangerous countries, the building of churches 
and charities, the education of millions of chil¬ 
dren. One argument is fairly balanced by the 
other. Men are by reason and by nature more 
inclined to accept the immortal life than to deny 
it. The pure in heart have as strong a tendency 
toward heaven as the impure have toward earth. 


THE SOUL OF MAN. 


35 


The soul is of its nature inclined to high flight 
like the eagle, and even if religion never en¬ 
lightened it would seek the peaks of the eternal 
world. It was a physician of Philadelphia who 
tried to prove that some men had immortal 
souls, while others had not, so convinced was 
he from experience that immortality alone could 
account for some phenomena in the nature of 
man. “My soul doth magnify the Lord, and 
my spirit hath rejoiced in God, my Savior.”— 
Luke i. 46, 47. 

EE. The Destiny of the Soul. 

1. After all, it is only a shallow thinker, a 
purblind observer, that could discover in our 
social life an argument against the doctrine of 
immortality. So convinced have men been of 
its truth that civilization has its very roots in 
it. It is the source of that democracy which is 
a mark of the Catholic Church, for the immor¬ 
tal soul makes all men equal by nature, with¬ 
out any regard to the physical condition. The 
prince and the beggar, the genius and the idiot, 
have precisely the same rights and privileges be¬ 
fore God. “ For there is no respect of persons 
with God.”—Rom. ii. 11. The Church throws 
open her highest positions to any child of man 
that can fill them creditably. Her Popes, prel¬ 
ates, nuncios, priests have been mostly the chil- 


36 THE chaplain’s sermons. 

dren of peasants. No one is denied the Sacra¬ 
ments on account of social inferiority. It is the 
soul with which the Church of Christ deals, and 
there are no degrees in its immortality. Hence 
the missionaries seem to prefer by a divine in¬ 
stinct the most neglected and helpless races for 
the exercise of their charity, and seek them out 
in Greenland and China without regard to per¬ 
sonal trials and dangers. They incur incredible 
hardships merely to baptize a few wretched in¬ 
fants whose parents have flung them out to die. 
The sense of immortality which is thus culti¬ 
vated in men is the source of that courage which 
animates at certain times the Catholic body. 
The martyr smiles at the threats and the re¬ 
wards of the persecutor; the patriot fights for 
his country to the last, knowing that he has 
nothing to lose here or hereafter; the great 
priest dies in exile unconquered, like Hilde¬ 
brand, or at the foot of the altar, triumphant, 
like Thomas a Becket; the Crusaders throw 
their lives away recklessly in the defence of the 
Holy Land and of Europe. The body of laws 
which rules modern society was born of Chris¬ 
tian faith and thought. The respect paid to 
the human body as the temple of the immor¬ 
tal soul displays itself in those laws: in the en¬ 
actments against slavery, against unjust employ¬ 
ers fostering indirect serfdom, against mutilation 
of the human body; in behalf of the poor, sick, 


THE SOUL OF MAN. 


37 


and distressed; in the care of the orphans, the 
unborn children, the burial-places for the dead. 
We have only to contrast the modern with the 
ancient legislation to see how deeply this great 
truth of immortality has gripped the minds and 
feelings of men. The freethinkers have been 
working for a century and a half to destroy the 
ramifications of the doctrine in modern society, 
and are still far from the dawn of success. The 
eternal life is the destiny of man, and they find 
the very stars in their courses fighting their 
ill-considered and malicious plans. “Raging 
waves of the sea, foaming out their own confu¬ 
sion, wandering stars; to whom the storm of 
darkness is reserved forever.”—Jude 13. 

2. It cannot be said of all Catholics that they 
show equal interest and ability in resisting the 
invasion of the freethinkers. Dwell for a mo¬ 
ment on that statement: my soul shall live for¬ 
ever. The last word sounds the destiny of the 
soul. Forever! Here is the metropolis of our 
land, the city of our pride, whose career in our 
fancy is to dim the glory and the age of Athens, 
Rome, Jerusalem, Paris, London. We shall be 
dead a thousand years, and it will still be young. 
But the soul lives forever! Here in our park 
is the obelisk of Cleopatra, gleaming with the 
suns and moons of long centuries, and destined 
to see as many more in the new land. We 
pause with emotion to recall the eyes that looked 


38 


THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 


at it long ago when Antony and young Octavius 
played the game of empire at Actium. The 
obelisk will be ashes after the longest existence, 
but the soul of Cleopatra lives forever. The 
earth, the stars, the universe, all the material 
beauty of God’s creation, so ancient and so 
beautiful—its endurance will be but a drop in 
the ocean of time compared to the everlasting 
endurance of the soul; its beauty only the 
beauty of death compared with the divine beauty 
of the immortal soul. The hour which sees a 
soul enter heaven should set the bells of eternity 
ringing as if a king were born. The splendor 
of the soul at that moment eclipses the sun. 
Even its entrance into hell has the grandeur of a 
terrible immortality about it. What joy, cour¬ 
age, consolation should not this great destiny 
give us! What shame should pursue the wretch 
who sells this birthright for the trinkets of time! 
Alas! we are too sordid, too steeped in the mire, 
to feel the gracious power of immortality. So 
Christ must cry out in the market-place: What 
doth it profit a man to gain the whole world if 
he lose his own soul! “ Thy men of peace have 
deceived thee, and have prevailed against thee, 
they have plunged thy feet in the mire, and in 
a slippery place, and have deserted thee.”—Jer. 
xxxviii. 22. 


THE SOUL OF MAN. 


39 


III. The Needs of the Soul. 

1. Of its own nature the soul will find eternity 
immediately after death, but it cannot of its own 
nature find the place of perfect happiness. It 
is a sophism of the time with the easy-going, 
the lazjq and the corrupt that we came into this 
world without our knowledge or consent, and we 
leave it in the same manner; therefore it is 
God’s business to look to the hereafter, and men 
are released from responsibility. If this rea¬ 
soning were applied to the earthly life its falsity 
would be evident. But men do not reason so 
foolishly in the pursuit of pleasure and gain. 
Observe the training of a learned pig, a trick 
dog, or a horse. Study the long preparation 
required from a circus boy, an engineer, or a 
professional man. Mark the emphasis laid by 
educators on the necessity of a careful prepara¬ 
tion for the duties of citizenship. How much 
is demanded of men who are to hold high posi¬ 
tions in society, art, science, and literature! 
Yet all these aims, and the labors to attain 
them, are simply of the earth and of time. Both 
perish with the man, they go into the grave 
together. It is wonderful what men will do to 
win the prizes of earth, what they will endure, 
what crimes they will commit. “ There is also 
another grievous evil which I have seen under 
the sun: riches kept to the hurt of the owner.” 


40 THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 

—Eccles. v. 12. If these prizes of dust are then 
worth so much trouble and pain, what must not 
be the value of the prize of the immortal life? 
If they cannot be won without immense labor, 
suffering, self-sacrifice; if they cannot be held 
without extreme watchfulness against the ever- 
scheming robbers of society, surely much more 
labor must be required to win the eternal life, 
to hold it against those who would snatch it 
from us. If we must pay so heavy a price for a 
sure income, an honorable name, a high posi¬ 
tion, a paying occupation—prizes that are lost 
to us with death, it is to be expected that the 
price for the prize of heaven must be heavier. 
If the world takes its pay in our sweat and 
our tears, eternity will have our heart’s blood. 
Therefore how foolish the thought of the lazy 
that God must look after our eternity. Time 
does not regard us on our entrance into the 
world, and we have to find our own way, make 
our own road, or perish. It is the same with 
eternity. 

2. Fired with these convictions, Catholics to 
a man must be naturally very busy in the affairs 
of the eternal life. Alas, no! The majority 
carry out their convictions, else the Church 
would not live. But what a tremendous num¬ 
ber have forgotten almost the thought of eternity 
and of immortality! They cherish the body, 
but starve the soul, of whose needs they have no 


THE SOUL OF MAN. 


41 


knowledge. Hot in the pursuit of gain, pleas¬ 
ure, comfort, the soul is left to feed itself, to 
prepare itself for eternity. The baptism of 
infancy, the confirmation of childhood, are the 
only forces working in these feeble personalities, 
while the passions are allowed full sway in the 
work of destruction. There is in fact no train¬ 
ing for immortality in these unfortunates. 
They live on to the end like healthy animals, 
the body full of sin and grossness, while the 
soul wastes away like one in prison, and is 
utterly silent at the last. Then it drops into 
eternity with no more strength than is required 
to keep it on the level of hell. Its wings would 
not bear it to the heights of heaven. And even 
the comfortably good neglect the soul in a dif¬ 
ferent fashion. They forget the value of the 
prize which they are seeking. They know that 
no man gets anything worth the having without 
paying full value for the article; yet their hope 
is to get heaven for the mere asking. Hence 
the meanness of their lives, the weakness of 
their charity, the absence of generosity, and the 
humdrum methods of devotion. The soul lan¬ 
guishes, and must spend much time in purgato¬ 
rial fires before its stains are burnt and purged 
away. 

3. Behold where infidels get their arguments 
and their scorn. They do not see in such Cath¬ 
olics much trace of the immortal soul, and small 


42 


THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 


sign of effort to reach the heaven of eternity. 
In fact, they see no difference between them 
and downright infidels. They are met in all the 
places of sin, their language and their actions 
coincide in vileness, the world owns them, they 
fight and die trying to seize and hold that world 
which digs their grave. It is a mournful spec¬ 
tacle, the sight of furious men, in the mad 
struggle for money and pleasure, clawing and 
eating one another like wild beasts, forgetful of 
true things; but it is horrible to see the Catho¬ 
lic in the same abyss struggling as vilely as the 
worst. You may think that infidels are too busy 
or too indifferent to note these treasons. On 
the contrary, having this very question of eter¬ 
nity to settle for themselves, they are forever 
watching the follower of Christ to learn what 
action his faith has upon his life. A thousand 
times they have printed the sins and failures of 
individual Catholics to show of how little use is 
this much-vaunted faith even to its professors, 
many of whom are as fond of money, as devoted 
to sin, as much tied to the earth, and as indif¬ 
ferent to heaven, as the atheist. No wonder 
Christ raised His divine voice in the market¬ 
place of the world: What doth it profit a man? 
We all know that it profits him nothing. Here 
side by side lie a dead Dives and the corpse 
of a Lazarus. What is the difference between 
them at this particular moment? None. The 


THE SOUL OF MAN. 


43 


beggar is as rich as his companion. The prince 
is possessed of nothing, not a penny, not a 
breath, nothing. And if he has lost his place in 
eternity, what then? The direct answer to the 
question of Christ is: It has profited nothing, 
for he has lost both his soul and his fortune. 

4. Since we believe and rejoice in the belief 
that man is immortal, we must make that belief 
practical by a noble preparation for eternity. 
We are surrounded by the means in plenty, and 
the Church has organized the work of salvation 
in such a manner that he who runs may use 
them. The soul must receive more attention 
than the body, the business, the most honorable 
of pleasures. This does not mean that we are 
to turn hermits, or even turn our back to the 
world; it simply means that we shall live the 
daily life of a good Catholic in the avoidance of 
sin and the doing of good. What true dignity 
it confers upon the humblest man to know and 
feel the eternal fire that burns within his body, 
and lifts him, not to the level of princes, but 
beyond them to the likeness of the living God! 
“ For if we have been planted together in the 
likeness of his death, we shall be also in the 
likeness of his resurrection.”—Bom. vi. 5. 


<£pe &ot>e of £>ur (ttetgfjfior. 

Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.—Mark xii. SI 
OUTLINE. 

1. Men being children of the same Father, and possessing 

the same nature, they are bound to love one another. 

2. This love is urged at all times, but particularly when 

distress rends the hearts of our brethren. 

3. All are in need of charity, because all are subject to trial 

and sorrow; but the poor are the neediest since they 
dwell with trouble. 

4. Our nature urges us to compassionate sorrow, and to 

help the distressed. 

6. Our natural shrewdness also bids us exercise sympathy 
and charity toward the needy. 

6. The safety of social order demands that the affluent en¬ 

gage constantly in the work of alleviating distress. 

7. The marks of a spurious charity which at present dis¬ 

plays itself before men. 

8. The principle upon which true charity is founded, and 

by which true charity reaches all distress. 

9. Time, energy, success, income, feeling, must be taxed 

in order to fulfil the commands of Christ in the matter 
of charity. 

I. The Sorrows of Men. 

1. When Christ said, the poor you have always 
with you, He uttered an economic truth which 
experience has made familiar to us. The phi¬ 
losophers have not yet been able to banish pov¬ 
erty. The poor are still numbered by the mil¬ 
lions, and so close are all men to the precipice 
of poverty, that by a turn of the social ma- 


THE LOVE OF OUR NEIGHBOR. 


45 


chinery millions more are added to the crowd. 
Christ attached Himself to the poor, and made 
the preaching of the Gospel to the poor one of 
the signs of His mission. The poverty which 
He chose for His own life is not the poverty of 
distress, but the poverty of labor; the common 
labor which never earns more than enough to 
support life in decency and simple comfort, 
which keeps society in order and on the alert, 
and which finally is the health of the world. 
The road which the poor travel is hard, provides 
no luxuries, presents many temptations, and is 
beset with sorrow; the road of the rich is soft 
to the foot, beautiful to the eye, easy to the 
spirit; but it is not free from sorrow, and it 
intensifies every temptation, strengthens every 
passion, and passes so close to hell that Christ 
could not but say : “ How hardly shall they that 
have riches enter into the kingdom of God.”— 
Luke xviii. 24. The few walk this beautiful 
road, the millions tread the other; and so Christ 
chose it that all men might see how much more 
beautiful it is in its simplicity than the road 
of wealth in its luxury. The people who walk 
these roads are all brethren, children of the 
Creator, bound for the same heaven, and having 
the same nature. They cannot help loving one 
another, since the common Father, the common 
nature, and the common destiny draw them to 
one another. 


46 THE chaplain’s sermons. 

2. This natural love is strengthened by grace. 
Without grace the natural attraction and affec¬ 
tion would not act with desirable uniformity, 
nor rise frequently to heroic heights. For love 
must be uniform to be of service, and it must 
rise often to heroism if duty is to be done. It 
must be displayed in all forms. As a rule, the 
sorrows of men draw it forth in its most beau¬ 
tiful and enthusiastic fashion. And how varied, 
how numerous, how pitiable are these sorrows! 
“ All his days are full of sorrows and miseries, 
even in the night he doth not rest in mind.”— 
Eccles. ii. 23. You have only to listen in the 
stillness of night, and imagination will bring to 
your ears the great cry of human distress which 
rises hourly to God. From the prisons and hos¬ 
pitals, from the sick-rooms, from the homes of 
misery and the haunts of sin, from thousands of 
breaking hearts whose anguish is hidden, rise 
moans and sighs and shrieks of agony. We 
are distressed by the extent and persistency of 
misery. Men cannot cope with it. As fast as 
one charity is in operation another is needed. 
If ever a time comes when physical sorrow can 
be attended to the moment of its occurrence, 
there will still be the immense sum of mental 
anguish which no human remedy can relieve, 
which must look to faith and to God for some 
alleviation: the father and mother grieving for 
the children gone forever; the separated friends; 


THE LOVE OF OUR NEIGHBOR. 47 

the victims of moral calamities; the persecuted 
just; the tortured souls whose sensitiveness of 
nature makes living itself a pain. Who would 
not do his utmost to banish this distress, to 
solve once for all this great mystery of human 
sorrow? Christ sent His cheering word to all 
sufferers: “ Come to me, all ye that labor and 
are burdened, and I will refresh you.”—Matt, 
xi. 28. 

3. Kiches do not secure men against the com¬ 
mon lot, though wealth does much to soften its 
bitterness. “ Kiches shall not profit in the day 
of revenge.”—Prov. xi. 4. The millionaire be¬ 
moans his dead child, his lost friend, with no 
consolation from his millions; but he can hurry 
away from the scenes of his grief, and steady 
his nerves by various distractions. The poor 
have no defence against sorrow except their sim¬ 
plicity and their sound health, which stand them 
in good stead. Misfortune beats them to the 
ground. Sicknoss and death shake the whole 
edifice of industry. A few months of enforced 
idleness and they are at the door of starvation. 
A change in wages and all their simple comforts 
are cut off at a stroke. The illness of one means 
the stripping of the others, for medical aid takes 
all the savings. The poor are helpless against 
wrong. An unjust employer, an oppressor can 
be reached only by the law, which is impossible 
on account of the trouble and expense. Bitter- 


48 THE chaplain’s sermons. 

ness of heart springs from this helplessness and 
adds to sorrow. The poor are helpless against 
the prevailing economic conditions. The people 
die in India by thousands in the famine time; 
in Italy they go without work and bread until 
nature and despair of mind urge to public riot 
and some relief; in happy America they shift 
along somehow, silent through pride, until a 
change arrives. It can be said that the poor 
dwell next door to sorrow. All this simply 
illustrates how much pain and anguish accom¬ 
panies life, and how necessary is it that we 
should be ever on the alert to bring prompt suc¬ 
cor to our brethren. “ I turned myself to other 
things, and I saw the oppressions that are done 
under the sun, and the tears of the innocent, and 
they had no comforter; and they were not able 
to resist their violence, being destitute of help 
from any.”—Eccles. iv. 1. 

II. Some Motives of Charity. 

1. It may surprise one to learn that we have 
little choice in the question of aiding the 
wretched. Although the will is free, and man 
can develop a surprising hardheartedness at 
times, yet he is so hedged in by natural sym¬ 
pathy, sound sense, and social necessity that 
he cannot withhold from suffering whatever it 
needs. The blessed nature given us by our 


THE LOVE OF OUR NEIGHBOR. 


49 


Father in heaven is beautiful because of that 
very tenderness, and ugly in proportion to the 
lack of it. There are human wolves who are 
ready and willing to destroy the helpless, rather 
than bear the burden, but they are the excep¬ 
tions. When misery is in our presence we are 
oppressed with our inability to relieve it. The 
intolerable leper, clothed with the mantle of the 
grave and yet alive, saddened Stevenson’s heart 
to the last degree; and he worshipped that 
Damien who did what so few can do: lived 
among the lepers, to comfort and strengthen 
them. The story of such disasters as that of 
the Johnstown flood loosens the purse-strings of 
the poorest. The child brought up in comfort, 
and ignorant that men may come to beggary, 
weeps terrified at the first view of wretchedness, 
and empties himself of liis little possessions to 
relieve such distress. No race falls so low as 
not to be touched by human misfortune. No 
person is there but has felt once in his life the 
impulses of natural sympathy. The philan¬ 
thropist has always been beloved of the race, 
because of his benevolence to the miserable, his 
readiness to spend time and thought and money 
to better their condition; and men erect stat¬ 
ues to his memory, his name, like Abou-ben- 
Adhem’s, leading all the rest. 

2. Even if our nature were less sympathetic, 
another element, our natural shrewdness, would 
4 


50 THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 

step in to stir our charity for the suffering. 
The experienced know the uncertainty of human 
prosperity, and how the rich of to-day may be 
the poor of to-morrow; how the robust may 
come to helplessness, and proud names come 
down to the gutter in shame. Nearly all the 
wretched once knew some kind of prosperity, 
and never dreamed of hardships. The loving 
hearts of men feel the gloom which the future 
may hold for their children, their dearest—that 
future which they themselves can only provide 
against, and not control. It is to their own 
personal interest that they keep alive a spirit of 
charity, or of benevolence, in the present, and 
thereby fix a strong tradition for future genera¬ 
tions. They do not know what unlucky turn of 
fortune’s wheel will turn even them into the 
dust. The illustrations of such happenings are 
all about them, in that most piteous sight of the 
rich become poor, the incapable rich, unable to 
work, and preferring starvation to public char¬ 
ity. Therefore the philanthropist is encour¬ 
aged, the state takes up the work of organized 
charity, and private benefactions are reduced to 
a system which will include every form of char¬ 
ity. “ There are just men to whom evils hap¬ 
pen as though they had done the works of the 
wicked.”—Eccles. viii. 14. 

3. Add patriotism to natural sympathy and 
foresight, and you have another strong motive 


THE LOVE OF OUR NEIGHBOR. 


51 


which compels even the indifferent to aid the 
distressed. The earnest citizen cannot but de¬ 
sire the peace of the nation, cannot but wish to 
see it always at peace with itself. Sectional 
bitterness, the exclusiveness of classes, are dan¬ 
gers to society, and nothing tends more to pro¬ 
duce them than the distress of the workers. 
It was said to have been the wise ambition of 
Henry IY. of France that every family in his 
kingdom should have a chicken for the Sunday 
pot; no true patriot but will cherish the same 
desire, whose quaint form expresses pithily the 
common prosperity. The distressed poor suffer 
not only the pains of their condition, but also 
the very natural bitterness aroused by seeing 
the luxuries of the rich, as it were, sneering at 
their misery. “Kiches make many friends; 
but from the poor man, even they whom he 
had depart.”—Prov. xix. 4. It is one of the 
grim satires on society that men can guzzle 
costly wines and ride in dazzling state while 
children starve and walk barefoot on the icy 
streets. No doubt the day will come when no 
man will be allowed to spend a cent in luxuries 
while his fellow can find no work or remains 
without the necessaries of life through no fault 
of his own. But it will be long before the ad¬ 
ministration of government reaches that perfec¬ 
tion. Meanwhile the poor feed on bitterness 
for want of food, and the foolish among the rich 


52 THE chaplain’s sermons. 

learn a certain scorn of these ragged and dirty 
souls, who must do without clothes and soap 
for reasons. The distressed reach out lean 
hands for the throats of the rich, and the latter 
suggest with Roboam that to the whips of dis¬ 
tress be added the whips of scorpions. Such 
division means danger and perhaps death to the 
nation. Therefore the patriot the wise rich, 
the sympathetic, and the fearful hasten to ban¬ 
ish bitterness by relieving distress. Then both 
parties learn that they are brethren, and are 
never so near in the most golden prosperity as 
in these tender moments when misfortune and 
necessity bring them into brotherly relationship. 
Elizabeth of Hungary, washing the sores of 
lepers, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked 
poor, watching with the sick and the dead, heal¬ 
ing wounded hearts, solves the severest troubles 
of empire. “ The rich and poor have met one 
another; the Lord is the maker of them both.” 
—Prov. xxii. 2. 

III. The Great Motive of Charity. 

1. But these natural motives, while worthy 
and beautiful, are insufficient to cope with hu¬ 
man distress and alleviate it. Their working is 
uniform, but feeble in one place, and out of gear 
in another. The results are unsatisfactory, as 
we see from the charity of pre-Christian times, 
of the modern state, and of certain individuals 


THE LOVE OF OUR NEIGHBOR. 


53 


of our day. The parable of the man who fell 
among thieves on the road up from Jericho is a 
clear instance of the charity of the times before 
Christ. The modern state, imitating the char¬ 
ity of Christians, sometimes in a friendly, often 
in a hostile spirit, has a complete system of re¬ 
lief for human distress. But it has not the soul 
of charity, only the form; and as a consequence 
the shelter of the poorhouse bears the shadow 
of disgrace, and carries a certain horror to the 
heart of the needy. Even the public hospital 
is entered with distaste, and men fly from state 
institutions with haste and try to forget their 
stay in them. Moreover, our day has seen de¬ 
velop a spurious charity in the form of public 
benefactions, in which there is an element that 
smacks of the pirate distributing his surplus 
to the poor. Here is a millionaire who made 
much of his money out of the miseries of work¬ 
men; yonder is another who became richer than 
Caesar by ruining a thousand humble owners of 
the business which he made his own; behold a 
third who treated his workers like slaves for 
twenty years before the law forced him to pay 
wages in money, not in due-bills. The first is 
building libraries, museums, and other non- 
essentials all over the country; the second has 
left an immense sum to educate the Fiji Island¬ 
ers ; and the third supports several missions in 
Africa. Babes labored and died in stifling fac- 


54 


THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 


tories, men starved in woods and mines, hearts 
withered into dust everywhere, that these men 
might pose as the benefactors of the race. This 
is not benevolence, but corruption. It has the 
odor of hell in its garments. It gives a tithe of 
its stealings to conceal the crime. The multi¬ 
tude often give these men credit for the beau¬ 
tiful virtue of charity or the human virtue of 
benevolence. “ A generation that for teeth hath 
swords, and grindeth with their jaw-teeth to 
devour the needy from off the earth, and the 
poor from among men.”—Prov. xxx. 14. 

2. It requires one great motive to arouse and 
direct the benevolence of man into effective 
action. Christ gave us that motive—a super¬ 
natural force which lifts our natural kindliness 
into the domain above nature, and gives to our 
efforts a system, an effectiveness, an adequacy, 
and a uniformity of action that otherwise would 
have been beyond attainment. “Thou shalt 
love thy neighbor as thyself ” was the belief but 
not the practice of the highest morality and re¬ 
ligion of ancient times. Christ made it the 
ordinary and ever-acting principle of His relig¬ 
ion; and He added to it the injunction: “This 
is my commandment, that ye love one another 
even as I have loved you”; and St. Paul inter¬ 
preted Him in the sentence: “ Bear ye one an¬ 
other’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.” 
Now the meaning of this new motive is not ex- 


THE LOVE OF OUR NEIGHBOR. 


55 


hausted when Christian charity has supplied 
all needs, physical and spiritual, of the dis¬ 
tressed. This in degree could be indeed supe¬ 
rior to former achievement, but not more than 
equal in kind. The superior element of the 
charity of Christ is the love which it provides 
for the object of our charity. The relief of the 
destitute must be done in perfect love for them. 
The spurious charity described above becomes a 
crime in comparison with such charity, and the 
state aid to the suffering looks like the shadow 
beside the substance. State treasuries cannot 
buy the affections of officials as easily as their 
time; hence the constant investigations being 
made into the horrors of state charities in vari¬ 
ous parts of the land. Indifference, harshness, 
cruelty, sometimes crime, mark many of the 
state institutions; and hard and cheerless for¬ 
mality, with honorable exceptions, marks all. 

It is not to be wondered at. The destitute, 
the sick and wounded, the insane, the orphans, 
the helpless aged, are not in themselves attrac¬ 
tive. Misfortune and disease rob beauty and 
greatness even of all their charm. The hired 
nurse and attendant are there to give intelli¬ 
gent service, not their love; and without love 
the services of charity become automatic, and 
promptly degenerate into the bargaining of the 
market-place. The charity of Christ, carried 
out by His disciples everywhere, has for its 


56 


THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 


chief element love. The Christians engaged in 
the service of the distressed bring love along 
with bread and wine and medicine to the 
wretched. They see in the object of charity an 
immortal soul, a prince of eternity, whom it is 
an honor to serve; they see in him a child of 
God, who yearns for him with the tenderness 
of the Father; and they see in him that Christ 
who said: “ As long as you did it to one of these 
my least brethren, you did it to me.”—Matt, 
xxv. 40. Therefore it is not surprising that the 
Christian Church should have brought into the 
world this new principle of charity, which em¬ 
braces all men, all times, all conditions. And 
with such a principle it is not surprising that 
her system of charity should be the despair of 
governments, both hostile and friendly. Her 
moneys are voluntarily given for the love of 
Christ, not raised by the strong arm of the state ; 
no investigation has to be made at intervals into 
the conduct of her institutions, into her treat¬ 
ment of the wretched; there is no heavy demand 

for salaries, as the servers of the wretched ask 

* 

little more than mere support; and occasionally 
the number and variety of her institutions of 
charity aid a trembling government to steady 
itself and to pay off its creditors, as in the case 
of Italy, which confiscated in a lump the revenues 
of a thousand endowed charities in that country. 

3. This principle of love for the object of 


THE LOVE OF OUR NEIGHBOR. 


57 


charity explains the success and the grandeur of 
the Catholic system of helping the wretched. 
See the teachers in the schools of the world, the 
missionaries in tlio wildest lands, the nurses of 
the lepers, the caretakers of the aged—what 
sweetness do they not bring to their hard and 
unattractive labors! They are the intimate 
friends of their charges. The horizon of their 
lives is the good of these unfortunates. Here is 
the true charity. It illustrates the words of 
Christ, and teaches us just what we have to do 
if we would carry out His commands to love our 
neighbors as ourselves. We must not only tax 
our incomes for the good work of succoring the 
wretched, but we must tax our time, tax our 
very success, tax everything of revenue that we 
have. For the time given we get eternity. Suc¬ 
cess is not much if it cannot spell help to others. 
Our friends are not much if for our sakes they 
cannot be induced to help. And the distressed 
need all that we can give them. They are 
ruined, and we need not fear that our charity 
will ruin us. It is beautiful to remember that 
whatever we do for the meanest of sufferers is 
really done for Jesus Christ the Lord. “ For I 
was hungry and you gave me to eat: I was 
thirsty and you gave me to drink: I was a 
stranger and you took me in: naked, and you 
covered me; sick, and you visited me: I was in 
prison and you came to me.”—Matt. xxv. 35, 36. 


to t- 


£(Je (JUtracufoue in f#e C^nsftan fetfe. 

And shall come to pass after this , I wid pour out my 

spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters 
shall prophesy; your old men shall dream dreams, and 
your young men shall see visions.—Joel ii. 28. 

THE OUTLINE. 

1. The miracles of Christ in behalf of the guests at Cana, 

the blind beggar, and the woman of Canaan. 

2. The feeding of the multitude, the raising of the widow’s 

son, and the healing of Malchus. 

3. Some peculiarities of these miracles which help us in the 

consideration of the miraculous in the Christian life. 

4. The age of miracles began with Christ, and has contin¬ 

ued to this day, though the sceptical assert the con¬ 
trary. 

5. The miracle of the living Church, surviving the ages, 

and the miracle of the living Pope, fixed in the holy 
city, though the gates of hell rose up against him. 

. The saints perform wonderful miracles in every age. 

. How far does the miraculous enter into the daily life of 
the true Christian : with striking examples. 

8. And in what way the power of God is exercised directly 

in behalf of His faithful children. 

9. Life would not be worth the living for the fervent 

Catholic, if the miraculous did not have its place in 
his daily activities. 


I. The Miracles of Christ. 

1. The artists of yesterday illustrated the life 
of the Saviour for us in poetic fashion. The 
artists of to-day, following the example of Tis- 
sot, are giving us exact tableaux of the various 


THE MIRACULOUS IN CHRISTIAN LIFE. 59 

scenes in that life. For example, the wedding 
at Cana in Galilee was once painted as the nup¬ 
tials of a prince; the guests sat in a palace hall, 
the furnishings were of the noblest, and in the 
centre reclined the Christ artistically robed, 
ordering the African slaves to fill the vases of 
marble with water. The modern painter de¬ 
scribes with his brush the wedding of poor and 
simple people in an obscure village of Galilee; 
the wine gives out to the disgrace of the wedding 
party, and the compassionate Mother of the Lord 
informs her Divine Son of the circumstance, 
with the conviction that He will provide against 
the impending shame. Again, in the case of 
the blind beggar who sat by the wayside won¬ 
dering at the sound of the multitude hurrying 
by, and who began to shout like a madman for 
the help of the Saviour, the old painters gave 
us a set of characters most elegant in pose and 
appearance; quite forgetful that beggars are 
rarely a pleasant sight, that this beggar must 
have been rather gruesome from neglect and 
long journeys, and that his manners were rough 
and brazen enough to scorn the advice of all 
about him to keep still and not trouble a dis¬ 
tinguished personage. The woman of Canaan 
pursued the Lord with shameless persistence, 
unawed by His silence, indifferent to the cold 
disciples, careless of the rebuke of the Saviour, 
and impertinent enough to reply to Him aptly. 


60 THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 

In these three cases our Lord granted a miracle 
at the earnest request of His Mother, an impor¬ 
tunate beggar, and a determined Gentile woman. 

2. It was otherwise in the following instances. 
He fed the five thousand men who had pursued 
Him with admiration, without regard to hunger 
and thirst, into places so remote that no food 
could be found before actual distress attacked 
them. No one asked for the miracle, and not 
even the disciples thought of it, for they were 
much troubled at having little food with them 
and less money. Out of His own compassion 
Jesus fed the five thousand and left enough food 
to supply another contingent. It seemed to be 
an accident, if anything accidental occurred in 
His life, His meeting the funeral procession of 
the boy of Naim. It does not appear that any 
one sent for Him, or knew His dignity when He 
commanded the bearers to lay down the bier, 
and turned to speak a word of comfort to the 
sorrowing mother. Of His own pity He re¬ 
stored to her the resurrected boy. No one could 
have been more astonished than the wounded 
servant of the high priest when the captive 
Saviour restored to him the ear which the 
wrathful Peter had cut off with the sword. In 
these three cases the miracle was the free gift of 
the Lord to people who were either hostile, in¬ 
different, or in simple admiration of Him. 

3. The peculiarity of these miracles is that 


THE MIRACULOUS IN CHRISTIAN LIFE. 61 


they were all performed for the common people, 
suffering under the ordinary burdens of every¬ 
day life. The New Testament contains but a 
small part of the gracious deeds of this sort 
showered upon the unfortunates of Palestine. 
We can easily read behind the words of St. John 
on this very point, and imagine what number¬ 
less wonders were done in any and all circum¬ 
stances by the Master, not only to prove His 
character and mission, and to impress His dis¬ 
ciples, but to make that beautiful presence of 
the God-Man on earth the sweetest event to the 
afflicted. The words of Mary at the wedding 
feast show that the miraculous was not extraor¬ 
dinary in her dealings with her Son. They 
make it clear that His previous life had blessed 
many a sufferer in a miraculous way. It would 
be surprising in the highest degree if every day 
had not witnessed its miracle. “ Behold I will 
bring them from the north country, and will 
gather them from the ends of the earth: and 
among them shall be the blind and the lame, the 
woman with child, and she that is bringing forth 
together, a great company of them returning 
hither. They shall come with weeping, and I 
will bring them back in mercy : and I will bring 
them through the torrents of waters in a right 
way, and they shall not stumble in it: for I am 
a father to Israel, and Ephraim is my first¬ 
born.”—Jer. xxxi. 8, 9. 


62 


THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 


II. Has the Age of Miracles Passed Away? 

1. There is no reason to assert that it has, as 
is the fashion with the opponents of Christian¬ 
ity. But they mean that the age of superstition 
has departed, for they do not believe in mir¬ 
acles. They accept as mere wonder stories, 
given out by the credulous disciples, the mir¬ 
acles of Christ. The age of miracles, for the 
believers, began with Christ, and has continued 
up to the present day. The Protestant idea, at 
the least a step-mother to scepticism, cuts off 
the career of the miracle and even of the miracu¬ 
lous, from any participation in life, with the 
ascension of Christ into heaven. And some¬ 
times there are to be found Catholics with this 
leaven working in them. They have never 
learned that the Christian life is related in every 
way to existing and continuous miracles, and is 
itself in one sense miraculous. It is the life of 
Christ’s grace; that is, the natural uplifted, 
sustained, and guided by the supernatural. 
The Christian is in daily contact with the grace 
of the Redemption. What that grace was in¬ 
tended to accomplish in him his natural powers 
could never have achieved. He is a member of 
that remarkable body of believers in the divin¬ 
ity of Christ who in the midst of the fearful 
corruption of a decadent world have kept them¬ 
selves clean and wholesome, and trained the 


THE MIRACULOUS IN CHRISTIAN LIFE. 63 


next generation in tlie love and service of God. 
If tliis is not a miracle in the exact meaning of 
the word, it is at least miraculous, above and 
beyond nature; and when the Christian life in 
its theory and its results is compared with the 
ordinary pagan life, the wonder of it is plain to 
any mind. “For you are all the children of 
God by faith in Christ Jesus.”—Gal. iii. 26. 

2. Two miracles, however, stand perpetually 
in the eye of time, so that every man can see the 
marvels, let him explain them as he will. The 
Catholic Church, in what may be called its 
official shape, with its head, its bishops, its 
priests and people, and its executive commit¬ 
tees the congregations, is not a light hid under 
a bushel. For many centuries it has stood be¬ 
fore the world, sometimes accepted as the great 
mother, sometimes derided by another name, 
and has held its own where all other human 
things have sunk into dust. Great forces sought 
to destroy it, and were themselves destroyed. 
The faithful understand that this is the miracle 
foretold by Christ: and the gates of hell shall 
not prevail against it: but the unfaithful and the 
unbeliever do not try to explain to themselves 
the wonder of the thing. The second miracle is 
the presence of the Pope in Pome. It is not of 
doctrine that he should be there permanently. 
St. Peter began in Jerusalem, went on to Anti¬ 
och, and finished in Rome. Not a few princes 


64 


THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 


and governments, and all the heretics, would like 
to see him elsewhere. The Eoman emperors, 
the modern emperors and kings, the forces of 
error in all times, his own people on occasions, 
and his own judgment in one instance, have 
forced him, or coaxed him, or terrified him to 
leave home; and he has always returned. Why 
he should be there in the face of so much oppo¬ 
sition, when apparently one place might be as 
good as another for the head of the Church, is 
inexplicable to the crowd. It is a public miracle 
of the hour. “ The most high God hath wrought 
signs and wonders toward me. It hath seemed 
good to me, therefore, to publish his signs be¬ 
cause they are great, and his wonders because 
they are mighty.”—Dan. iii. 99. 

3. In the lives of the saints any one can read 
how they repeated the miracles of Christ: the 
raising of the dead, the curing of diseases, 
the resurrection of souls from abysses of sin, the 
defiance of the laws of nature in long fasts, in 
walking on the waters, in walking through the 
air. The saints are always with us, though their 
lives are led in obscurity and their wonderful 
gifts are exercised with true discretion. These 
and many other things prove what the man of 
faith feels, that the age of miracles is simply 
another name for the age of Christ. “ He is the 
deliverer and saviour, doing signs and wonders 
in heaven and in earth.”—Dan. vi. 27. 


THE MIRACULOUS IN CHRISTIAN LIFE. 65 


III. The Miraculous in Daily Life. 

1. The Christian lives on so high a plane that 
events which would once have been classed as 
miracles are no longer in that category. For 
instance, consider the return of a sinner to grace. 
When a soul wilfully cuts itself off by mortal 
sin from the current of grace, there is no earthly 
power which can restore to it that grace. Its 
position is precisely that of an inhabitant of the 
ark, if such a one jumped into the flood. The 
waste of waters held no refuge for him, and return 
to the ark was impossible without special help 
from God and special permission. The Church 
has the power to receive back the sinner, but it 
has not the power to originate in him the desire 
to return. That grace must come directly from 
God. It seems incredible. The sinner declares 
that he has only to step into the confessional, 
fulfil the conditions, and his soul is restored to 
life. But the wish to step into the confessional 
and the ability to fulfil all the conditions—where 
is he to get these? Not in himself, nowhere on 
earth, for he has forfeited all his claims on God 
by deliberate treason. The grace of God must 
pierce his nature by direct action of the Divinity 
before he can act or the Church can act with him. 
This return of the sinner we call a miracle of 
grace to distinguish it from the regular miracle. 
It is no longer a miracle in the particular sense 
5 


66 


THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 


of the term. The same holds good with regard 
to the priest and the Blessed Eucharist. Here 
is a man born of woman, with no powers be¬ 
yond the natural, except as an official of the 
Church. In ordination the Church confers on 
him the power to change the substance of the 
bread into the substance of the body and blood 
and soul and divinity of Jesus Christ, simply 
by uttering the words of consecration in the 
Mass. It is a standing miracle. It is the 
greatest of all the wonders performed within 
the Church, and it is done daily by thousands of 
priests all over the world. But it is not classed 
as a miracle in the particular sense of the term. 
All these actions are of the miraculous, how¬ 
ever, and their number is legion. For example, 
consider the action of the Blessed Eucharist 
among men, from its resting-place in our taber¬ 
nacles. The Scriptures tell us something of the 
wonders wrought by Christ among the people, 
but leave most of them undescribed, and are 
utterly silent as to the daily life of Egypt and 
Nazareth. What must not have been the won¬ 
ders worked by Christ every day in behalf of 
those with whom He came in contact, in be¬ 
half of all who knew Him and loved Him and 
needed Him! That ceaseless activity of love 
has been continued through the Blessed Eucha¬ 
rist for centuries. The records hint at it, but 
they are incomplete. It is not always working 


THE MIRACULOUS IN CHRISTIAN LIFE. 67 


miracles, for miracles are not always needed, 
but it is forever working wonders. 

2. This brings us to a beautiful condition in 
the Christian life where the miraculous, if not 
the miracle, has full sway. Too many Catholics 
ignore it, despise it in their ignorance, or neg¬ 
lect and misunderstand it. It is that neutral 
ground lying between the limits of man’s natural 
power and the exclusive territory of the miracle. 
Let us call it the land of the wonderful, and try 
to explain it in this way. Troubles and diffi¬ 
culties beset a man; he exhausts human skill 
and ingenuity to escape from them, but fails at 
the last. What is left for him to do? The 
atheist and the fatalist submit in sullen rage to 
their fate. The careless or ignorant Catholic 
does the same, because he has satisfied himself 
that the age of miracles is past, and no miracle 
will be worked for him. The faithful soul 
whose reliance is always on the tenderness of 
God’s love betakes himself to prayer. Is there 
need of a miracle in this event? Not at all. 
The power of man has been exhausted, but this 
is not the same as saying that now the special 
power of God is required in a miracle. There 
is still a way out of difficulties—a natural way 
known to no man, a present secret which genius 
will discover twenty years hence. What is 
there to hinder God’s making it known in some 
way to the faithful petitioner? Take the case of 


68 THE chaplain’s sermons. 

typhoid fever described by Father Kneipp. 
The man was dying with a high fever, when it 
occurred to the priest that the reduction of that 
fever might aid the patient the better to bear the 
strain. He had him dipped into an ice-cold 
bath at intervals. The fever diminished, the 
patient recovered, and now the cold bath is 
a feature in the treatment of typhoid. Take 
the case of patients suffering with diphtheria. 
Twenty years ago a majority of these patients 
died, while to-day the majority recover by the 
use of antitoxin. Twenty years ago the limit 
of man’s skill was reached at diphtheria, but 
now it goes beyond. There was then in the 
world a remedy, a natural remedy, for this dis¬ 
ease. What was to hinder God’s making that 
remedy known at any time to those who asked 
His aid? This action would be only of the same 
character as the conferring of direct spiritual 
graces, and the result would be not a miracle, 
but a wonderful thing. A religious community 
devoted to St. Joseph found themselves one day 
in serious money difficulties. Collections had 
failed, supposed sources of revenue turned out 
hopeless, debts were due on the morrow, and 
the treasury remained empty in spite of strong 
efforts to get the necessary funds. Then the 
simple-minded superior tied up the bills in a 
bundle and hung them about the neck of St. 
Joseph’s statue. Said she: "These debts were 


THE MIRACULOUS IN CHRISTIAN LIFE. 69 


all incurred in your name, for the poor children 
in our charge. We have done our utmost to 
pay them at the right time, and have failed. It 
is your turn now.” The next day a lady called 
upon the superior to pay her a legacy left to 
the community by her mother. Delays had in¬ 
tervened, but by some happy accident she found 
herself that morning ready to fulhl the obliga¬ 
tion of paying the sum at the earliest oppor¬ 
tunity. In this case also there is no miracle. 
The processes are all natural. There is only 
the wonder of the thing. But what a rebuke to 
the sneering and sceptical Christian is the exist¬ 
ence of this region of the wonderful, wherein the 
Lord delights to work for the happiness, the 
mere pleasure of His children! From its treas¬ 
ures have been constructed the beautiful legends 
of the great Catholic nations of the past—legends 
which show forth the strong Catholic feeling 
that God walks the earth in modern days as 
nobly as in the days when men were gods; 
though now His presence tarries not, fleeting 
glimpses of His glory only are given, but the 
permanent gift from His generous hands re¬ 
mains. 

3. This middle region of the wonderful should 
be a lesson and a warning. The first effect of 
modern scepticism on the Christian is to make 
him accept the dictum that the age of miracles 
has passed away. With that acceptance it is 


70 


THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 


certain that the miracle passes out of his life. 
And the wonderful accompanies it. He forgets 
that there is a distinction between the two, and 
so loses his chance of either. The modern ten¬ 
dency is altogether in favor of the physical law, 
which some men so reverence that a violation of 
it is to them what may be called a criminal im¬ 
possibility. Our life is so ruled by this law 
that we are mere machines to illustrate its work¬ 
ings. If we need rain to grow the wheat and 
run the mill and get the bread which keeps life 
in us, and the law refuses rain, no prayer to the 
Creator will bring that rain. This confidence 
in the rigidity of the law may be well founded, 
but the action of law is never as rigid as a ma¬ 
terialist’s expression of it. That same law is 
forever upsetting its worshippers by the num¬ 
ber of its unaccountable exceptions, sardonic, 
frisky, as if the little god were having fun with 
his adorers. These exceptions may not be such, 
but only expressions of greater extension in the 
law than the adorers have yet perceived. Here, 
then, is the wonderland even for the materialist. 
But for the believer in God’s beautiful provi¬ 
dence wonderland is the halo which surrounds 
our hard, prosaic daily life. It is the region of 
the miraculous, near by the lovely land of the 
miracle. Without it life would be prosy and 
dull, the saints alone would possess its charm, 
and common people would have nothing to show 


THE MIRACULOUS IN CHRISTIAN LIFE. 71 

for their steady connection with the life of 
heaven. This is the lesson, and the warning 
reminds the sceptical of what they have lost and 
may lose by their submission to the harsh infi¬ 
delity of the hour. They might have had fewer 
graves to mourn over, fewer wounds to nurse in 
the secret places of the heart, fewer losses, and 
better health, finer spirits, truer friends, than 
have fallen to their share. “ And coming near 
to the den, he cried with a lamentable voice to 
Daniel, and said to him: Daniel, servant of the 
living God, hath thy God, whom thou servest 
always, been able, thinkest thou, to deliver thee 
from the lions? And Daniel answering the 
king, said: O king, live forever. My God hath 
sent his angel, and hath shut up the mouths 
of the lions, and they have not hurt me: foras¬ 
much as before him justice hath been found in 
me.”—Dan. vi. 20-22. 


g$e (Sofben (gufe of justice. 

And as you would that men should do to you, do you also to 
them in like manner.—Luke vi. 31. 

OUTLINE. 

1. Men must work arduously to keep life in their bodies, 

and with all their labor no race of men becomes 
wealthy. 

2. Very few recognize the necessity of poverty, and all 

strive with might and main to acquire riches. 

3. In which only the minority succeed, while the majority, 

money-mad, failing to secure even a competence, fall 
into various disorders. 

4. Out of these disorders, the dishonesties of the disap¬ 

pointed millions, rise the great dishonesties which en¬ 
slave mankind. 

5. The innumerable cheatings of masters and servants, par¬ 

ents and children, guardians and clients, landlords and 
tenants, merchants and buyers. 

6. The dishonesties of professional men, of state officials, 

of political leaders, of manufacturers, and of public 
teachers. 

7. The general character of great robberies, and what they 

achieve. 

8. The principles on which these gigantic injustices are 

justified. 

9. The great principle introduced by Christ, by which they 

are all condemned. 


I. The Money-Mad. 

1. With regard to the accumulation of riches, 
God made the world in one fashion, and men 
are always busy trying to make it over after a 


THE GOLDEN RULE OF JUSTICE. 73 

fashion of their own. God made the world on 
the principle that with steady labor and a steady 
saving there will be just enough to keep men 
active, but never enough to afford them luxuri¬ 
ous ease. There will be no superfluities, and 
luxuries will be so called because of their rarity. 
A strange fact is that each community, no mat¬ 
ter how great its aggregate wealth, always lives 
from hand to mouth. If the community stops 
working a season the whole body suffers se¬ 
verely. The nations have been laboring since 
time began, and have opened mines of diamonds, 
silver, and gold; yet what now has man to show 
for his labor and his treasures? “And when I 
turned myself to all the works which my hands 
had wrought, and to the labors wherein I had 
labored in vain, I saw in all things vanity and 
vexation of mind, and that nothing was lasting 
under the sun.”—Eccles. ii. 11. If the riches of 
one nation had passed to another, there would 
be enough in the world to-day to make each 
man comfortable. But it seems that with the 
nation its accumulation dies. Ancient treasures 
have vanished. Each nation begins life in hard¬ 
ship and works slowly to a maturity of comfort. 
The nations of the past contribute little more 
than their experience, and not all of that, to the 
building up of the new. This is a wonderful 
condition of things. It shows us that we shall 
never have a nation of millionaires, or a nation 


74 


THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 


where men will have enough to make work un¬ 
necessary. It makes plain the fact that the 
multiplication of gold and silver cannot multiply 
the number of drones beyond a certain point; 
and the other fact that money cannot take the 
place of labor. The old law holds good at this 
moment that man must earn his bread in the 
sweat of his brow. Thus has God planned for 
man. In consequence the workers are the real 
people of the world, and they have the health, 
cheerfulness, and sanity of life, while the pow¬ 
ers of society are really wielded by them. 
“Better is the poor man walking in his sim¬ 
plicity than the rich in crooked ways.”—Prov. 
xxviii. 6. 

2. Unfortunately men have never believed in 
the beauty of God’s way, its wisdom has never 
been understood by them. The dream of men 
is to become rich, and each youth sets out to 
secure a fortune. The ideal is to have plenty 
of money, which is supposed to buy every en¬ 
joyment, and often happiness. Hence the mad 
pursuit of riches which has marked every race, 
and seems to increase in madness as the race 
grows older and opportunities of wealth multi¬ 
ply. It is not to be wondered at that the pagan 
should seek wealth, since his life is concerned 
only with this world; but who will explain the 
fever for gold that consumes so many Christians? 
Do they forget the clear declarations of Christ 


THE GOLDEN RULE OP JUSTICE. 75 

on the matter of riches? “ Woe to you that are 
rich, for you have your consolation.”—Luke vi. 
24. “ How hardly shall they that have riches 

enter into the kingdom of God.”—Mark x. 23. 
“ It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye 
of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the 
kingdom of God.”—Luke xviii. 25. No, these 
sayings are not forgotten, but they are inter¬ 
preted pleasantly. The interpretation means in 
the end that Christ did not speak literally. The 
Christian continues his pursuit for riches to the 
destruction of comfort, of the practice of religion, 
of hi3 virtue, and often of his faith. The lesson 
of history is never learned, that the majority of 
men will ever remain poor. Even if it were re¬ 
membered, numbers would regard life as a lot¬ 
tery, and work just as hard for the mere excite¬ 
ment of winning a prize. What man would 
refuse a fortune if offered to him, even with the 
words of Christ ringing in his ears like the last 
trumpet? “There is no wisdom, there is no 
prudence, there is no counsel against the Lord.” 
—Prov. xxi. 30. 

3. Undoubtedly this money-madness must 
have a bad effect on its victims. First comes 
the disappointment, when old age arrives and 
the poor wretch is still penniless. Hope has 
departed, the dream is over, and the halo of life 
fades away, leaving respectable poverty a dis¬ 
gusting reality. What bitterness wells up in 


76 


THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 


such a heart! What despondency follows the 
madness! And often comes sin, in the shape of 
cheap dissipation, to drag honorable poverty 
into the mud! “ Labor not to be rich, but set 

bounds to thy prudence. Lift not up thy eyes 
to riches which thou canst not have, because 
they shall make themselves wings like those of 
an eagle, and shall fly toward heaven.”—Prov. 
xxiii. 4, 5. Again, while the fever is on them 
men work madly and scheme unscrupulously to 
reach their ambition. Labor becomes a curse 
to them, rather than the happy exercise of their 
faculties. Tied to their treadmill, with eyes 
fixed on the dollars rolling in, they have no 
leisure to live. The prisoner of Sing Sing leads 
a happy life compared to them. Their minds, 
consciences, souls become the slaves of their 
ruling passion, and they see all things from God 
to nothingness in its terrific light. Whether the 
result is wealth or poverty, the effect on them 
is the same. In time the money-madness dif¬ 
ferentiates its victims into slaves, drones, and 
thieves, with as many varieties as individuals. 
The slaves are not always voluntary, but they 
are directly or indirectly the victims of the 
money-making spirit. The poor wretches, who 
toil night and day in factories, mines, and 
sweat-shops, are urged on one side by their own 
fever and on the other by the fever of the em¬ 
ployer, who reduces their wages, encloses them 


THE GOLDEN RULE OF JUSTICE. 77 

in poisonous rooms, and cheats them into the 
bargain, in order to win his fortune. The 
drones are the philosophers, or perhaps the 
clowns of the circus. They are either the chil¬ 
dren of the rich, busy in spending foolishly 
what was acquired unjustly; or the shrewd ben¬ 
eficiaries of past injustice, reaping carefully now 
ten times more than their right allows; or the 
lazy, good-natured crowd, born of nature’s pro¬ 
test against false conditions, who live on their 
friends, relatives, the public, or the country at 
large. “ For when a man laboreth in wisdom 
and knowledge and carefulness, he leaveth what 
he hath gotten to an idle man: so this also is 
vanity, and a great evil.”—Eccles. ii. 21. It is a 
true saying that one-half the world lives on the 
other half. The thieves are the professional 
robbers, from the common criminal who lives 
poorly by cheap stealing, up to the magnates 
who manipulate the markets and remain out of 
jail by buying beforehand the roads that lead 
to the jail. Thus the money-madness breeds a 
thousand injustices every hour, until the plague 
of flies obscures the sun and leads one to believe 
there is no justice in the world. 

II. Individual Dishonesties. 

1. We rarely feel our own dishonesties until 
the thieves steal directly from our purses. We 
rarely connect the great robberies of the modern 


78 


THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 


barons with the little every-day cheatings of the 
multitude. Yet a gigantic tree must have a rich 
soil and gigantic roots from which to draw its 
nourishment. Study the latest combinations 
for the robbery of the workers, such as the coal 
companies, the oil companies, and the rubber 
companies. Examine the conquest of India, the 
partition of Poland, and the stealing of China. 
These are the performances of Christian men 
and of Christian countries, and Catholics have 
been actors in the injustices and sharers in the 
gains. “ I turned myself to other things, and I 
saw the oppressions that are done under the sun, 
and the tears of the innocent, and they had no 
comforter; and they were not able to resist their 
violence, being destitute of help from any.”— 
Eccles. iv. 1. Faint protests and strong protests 
have been made against these wrongs, but they 
have not been effective, and the convicted crim¬ 
inals have held their positions in society, held 
their pews in the churches, shared much of their 
plunder with the poor and the press, and kept 
out of jail, even living in palaces of royalty or 
close by. Their number increases in the face 
of the impotent lawmaker, struggling to create 
a statute which will hinder their development. 
The great robbers .buy the lawmaker, corrupt 
the judge, block the courts, and crush an oppo¬ 
nent with one hand while they continue to thieve 
with the other. What is the secret of their 


THE GOLDEN RULE OF JUSTICE. 


79 


power? In what soil does this devil-tree place 
its roots and secure such a grip? In the soil 
provided by the million small injustices of 
smaller men. 

2. It is incredible what an amount of small 
dishonesty there is in the world. The money- 
madness prompts to universal dishonesty. 
Think of the number of persons who rarely pay 
anything for their living expenses, since they 
cheat in turn landlord, grocer, butcher, tailor, 
dressmaker, milliner, doctor, and the teachers 
of their children, with the excuse that they 
really have no money for these expenses. Ob¬ 
serve the servants and workmen who cheat their 
employers daily in surprising ways: the clerks 
in offices, the conductors on trains and cars, the 
cashiers in banks, and the handlers of money in 
general, who steal small sums year after year, 
undetected and unpunished; the contractors 
who steal on their contracts, the parents who 
use moneys left in trust to them for their own 
children, the children who rob their parents, 
the faithless guardians of orphans and widows 
who steal whole estates. What an army ! It is 
impossible to track and describe the infinite vari¬ 
ety of these smaller cheatings. The perpetra¬ 
tors have excuses for their own consciences. 
They are not paid enough by their employers, 
and by stealing are only taking their own; or 
the victims will never miss so small a sum; or 


80 


THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 


are able to afford such losses, and deserve to 
lose much more, and it is no more than taking 
one’s own; with a score of flimsy reasons to 
justify further stealing. “ I said in my heart 
concerning the sons of men that God would 
prove them and show them to be like beasts.”— 
Eccles. iii. 18. 

3. Proceed a step higher in the scale of life, 
where incomes are large and life is a struggle, 
not for bread and butter, but for luxury and 
power. What a battalion of thieves surrounds 
the government treasury with plans to steal it 
bodily! Robbery is done according to forms of 
law, through legislative enactment; offices are 
bought, sold, taxed, like merchandise; black¬ 
mail of corporations is made a trade. The 
makers and sellers of food and drink adulterate 
and cheapen to the point of reducing foods and 
drinks to sawdust and poison. Employers steal 
from their workers by raising their wages and 
taking back the increase by forcing the same 
results from them on poorer material. It is a 
vain task following all the forms of lesser and 
greater dishonesties. Let it be said in brief 
that they reach the depths of absolute depravity, 
as when dealers in drugs threaten the lives of 
the sick by selling useless or half-useful medi¬ 
cines. Here, then, is the rich, fruitful, ever-deep¬ 
ening soil in which the great frauds thrive. We 
have all contributed our mite to it. What right 


THE GOLDEN RULE OF JUSTICE. 81 

have we to complain when thieves of genius, of 
administrative power, turn our methods upon 
ourselves? The great public, scientific, and 
strictly legal frauds of the time are built on the 
callousness of the multitude. A railway corpo¬ 
ration is seized by one man, who ruins its small 
owners, reduces wages, raises freight rates and 
passenger rates at pleasure; and because he 
keeps out of jail men praise him, forget his 
crimes after a while, and receive him into their 
houses as the great railway genius. The oil 
company drives out of the field all competitors 
by force, fraud, and persuasion, raises the price 
of oil to the consumer and reduces the wages of 
the workers, poses as a benefactor of the nations, 
and sees its chief robbers honored as the build¬ 
ers of churches and universities. If their crimes 
could be proven in court they would be life- 
prisoners of our jails. “ I saw under the sun in 
the place of judgment wickedness, and in the 
place of justice iniquity. And I said in my 
heart: God shall judge both the just and the 
wicked, and then shall be the time of every¬ 
thing.”—Eccles. iii. 16, 17. 

III. The Condemnation by Christ. 

1. It is instructive to study the principles 
upon which the great robbers defend their 
crimes. The first is simply expressed: it is 
the custom. All men are doing the same thing, 
6 


82 


THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 


and therefore little harm attaches to it. A tribe 
in Borneo has the custom of cutting off and pre¬ 
serving the heads of enemies; certain Chinese 
have the custom of destroying female children; 
in a few islands of Polynesia the custom of eat¬ 
ing human flesh prevails: therefore the residents 
of these places are justified in their practices. 
A second principle is: I can buy and sell at the 
rates of necessity. A third: I can lend money 
at any rate of interest, if I can get it. A fourth: 
labor is a, commodity like flour and potatoes, 
and I can pay for it as little as I can persuade 
or force the laborer to take. A fifth: if I do not 
ruin my rival at the first opportunity he will 
ruin me. A sixth: any means not leading to jail 
is justifiable in reaching an honest end. These 
lies are held as axioms both by the robbers and 
by their victims. Gazing at the market-place 
from afar, it looks like a whirlpool of hell, 
wherein men struggle with one another, stran¬ 
gling, beating, stabbing, rending, the defeated 
plunged into lower depths, the victorious rising 
to leap upon fresh enemies. Gazing upon the 
workers in mines and fields and factories, the 
sight is woeful. Yet here we have spoken only 
of man’s injustice to man in money matters. 
What shall be said when we have added all the 
other injustices? “ When just men increase, the 
people shall rejoice: when the wicked shall bear 
rule, the people shall mourn.”—Prov. xxix. 2. 


THE GOLDEN RULE OF JUSTICE. 


83 


2. It is not a wonder that the sages of Rome 
and Greece and earlier empires in their decay 
mourned that no principle could be found to 
cool the money-madness in men. “Hell and 
destruction are never filled: so the eyes of men 
are never satisfied.”—Prov. xxvii. 20. We are 
more fortunate. Christ has uttered the princi¬ 
ple by which order has been introduced into 
this awful chaos: and He has given His grace 
to apply it and secure for it full efficiency. 
“ Ho unto others as you would have others do 
unto you.” And for His children He has added 
the command: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as 
thyself. Hard-headed men of business smile at 
these quaint and old-fashioned sayings, which 
suit the school rather than the market-place or 
man’s dealings with men. Yet these sayings are 
the life of society at this moment, and did they 
not prevail in modern life society would perish. 
To do unto others as you would have them do 
unto you is the way of peace, order, profit, and 
success; and the way of disorder and destruc¬ 
tion is to have done unto you by others what 
you have done unto them. The money-mad re¬ 
ject the principle laid down by Christ, since it 
prevents them from getting a fortune, hinders 
the growth of millionaires, and prevents the cor¬ 
porations of piracy. Yet in the end, when soci¬ 
ety makes up its balance-sheet, and the averages 
must be shown, it is found that Christ is right 


84 


THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 


and men are in the wrong. “ All the labor of 
man is for his mouth, but his soul shall not be 
filled.”—Eccles. vi. 7. What men gain by in¬ 
justice they lose by counter-injustice, or society 
loses in the end. The examples are many. An 
employer unjustly reduces wages to increase his 
income; his angered workmen begin to steal 
from him, to turn out inferior work, to give him 
poorer service. The corrupt politicians have 
bred a race of venal voters. The corrupt corpo¬ 
rations, which cannot thrive but by the purchase 
of legislatures and judges, breed a race of black¬ 
mailers. All help to increase the criminal 
classes, private losses become immense, and 
taxation for the support of prisons adds to the 
burden. “When the wicked are multiplied, 
crimes shall be multiplied.”—Prov. xxix. 16. 
The popularity of the anarchist is explained by 
the helplessness of society before the modern 
barons; that is, the two extremes of society, its 
two dangers, are the anarchist and the money- 
king. If the principle of Christ is followed by 
the majority, these dangers will disappear; if it 
is rejected, society shares the fate of the ancients. 

3. In the early history of nations there is a 
strong application of the principle, Do unto 
others as you would have others do unto you. 
And what order prevails in such a community 
governed by it! There the fatal errors which 
rule men’s conduct just now are not known; the 


THE GOLDEN RULE OF JUSTICE. 


85 


money-lender is content with legal interest, and 
looks not for blood in the stones; buyer and 
seller ask only fair treatment according to the 
markets, and give more than is just for kind¬ 
ness’ sake; the laborer receives honest wages, 
and returns honest service; men seek fortune 
and competence and provision for old age, but 
they are not money-mad, and they seek nothing 
at the expense of honesty. Where the spirit of 
Christ directs the application of the rule, and 
men love one another for His sake, the ideal 
society thrives. Fortunately for us, there are 
many of these societies. As they thrive the 
world thrives. "The meadows are open, and 
the green herbs have appeared, and the hay is 
gathered out of the mountains. Lambs are for 
thy clothing, and kids for the price of the field. 
Let the milk of the goats be enough for thy 
food, and for the necessities of thy house: and 
for maintenance for thy handmaids.”—Prov. 
xxvii. 25-27. 


£0e $fague of (Uncfeannees. 

For know ye this and understand that no fornicator or un¬ 
clean or covetous person , which is a serving of idols, hath 
inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God. — Ephes. 
v. 5. 


OUTLINE. 

1. The destruction of the famous Cities of the Plain illus¬ 

trates the terror of God’s judgment on the unclean of 
heart. 

2. The Creator has enlightened man, both through reason 

and through grace, as to laws which regulate carnal 
appetites. 

3. And man, for reasons which shame his intelligence, has 

steadily refused to observe these laws, and in conse¬ 
quence sinks below the level of the beast. 

4. The results of uncleanness are seen in a slavery of soul, 

and mind, and body to the carnal appetite, and in a 
great horror of the life to come. 

5. The unclean so spread the disease that the world reeks 

with it to the ruin of the innocent and the disorder 
of society. 

6. The divorce court, the impure journals, and the obscene 

secret press show the extent of the plague of unclean¬ 
ness. 

7. Therefore the greatest care should be taken by parents 

to guard their children from the plague. 

8. A clean and well-protected youth is a guarantee of an 

honorable age, if the grace of God flows in upon it 
constantly. 

I. Christ Against the World. 

1. Our Blessed Lord Lad always a profound 
contempt for the world, and scored it often in 
His discourses. The contrast between His doc- 


THE PLAGUE OF UNCLEANNESS. 


87 


trine and its vileness is startling, but nowhere is 
it more so than in this matter of personal clean¬ 
ness. He taught the sinfulness of a deliberate 
thought and desire against purity; and the world 
erects temples to passion and worships the em¬ 
blems of sin as gods. To grasp firmly just what 
God thinks of uncleanness, we have only to read 
the story of the Cities of the Plain as told in the 
Scriptures. They were prosperous, brilliant, 
and populous cities, in which sensual pleasures 
had become the common pastime of the people. 
Their temples were devoted to it, their private 
and public life was steeped in it, so that shame 
was a stranger in the streets of Sodom and Go¬ 
morrah. “ And the Lord said: The cry of Sodom 
and Gomorrah is multiplied, and their sin is 
become exceedingly grievous.”—Gen. xviii. 20. 
Abraham pleaded in their behalf, when God an¬ 
nounced His intention to destroy them, and he 
would have saved them had there been ten clean 
persons in their boundaries. They were wiped 
out in fire. Not a soul escaped from them but 
the relatives of Abraham. When he looked 
down from the mountain on the spot where the 
cities had flourished as in a garden, he saw only 
the smoking earth, ghastly and sunken, which 
to moderns is known as the region of the Dead 
Sea. “ He looked toward Sodom and Gomor¬ 
rah, and the whole land of that country; and he 
saw the ashes rise up from the earth as the 


THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 


smoke of a furnace.”—Gen. xix. 28. The cen¬ 
turies have come and gone, but no beauty has 
returned to the vilest spot among the scenes of 
man’s vileness. It is the fashion with some 
infidels to criticise this wholesale destruction of 
the guilty and the innocent, the babes and the 
adults, as unbecoming the tenderness of the 
God of the Christians. Apart from the fact 
that God does not look upon death as a misfor¬ 
tune to men, He can be thanked for His mercy 
to the innocent on this occasion. He removed 
them from a world wherein every circumstance— 
inherited taste, their history, their connections— 
would have urged them to repeat the shameful 
deeds of their fathers. The effect of a residence 
in Sodom was made clear in the career of the 
God-fearing Lot afterward. 

2. Thus God regards the indulgence of sensu¬ 
ality. He is the Creator of the composite crea¬ 
ture called man. He gave him his body and his 
soul, and He established the beautiful relation¬ 
ships by which all men are related to one another 
in the flesh. We are all descended from Adam, 
and the last man of time shall be related to the 
first almost as Cain and Abel were to Adam. 
Though we draw our substance from the earth, 
our form came from the parents who brought us 
forth. How deeply God respected the relation¬ 
ship which His wisdom and love founded can be 
seen in His decree that the man and woman in 


THE PLAGUE OP UNCLEANNESS. 


89 


marriage become one flesh. How sacred He 
thought that relationship can be learned from 
the mantle of secrecy, the profound modesty, 
thrown over the act of marriage. That modesty 
is deep rooted in human nature, in both the 
reason and the instinct. It takes a long course 
of savagery or licentiousness to destroy it, and 
no man can explain its essence. It is mysteri¬ 
ous and beautiful. Mute and unfeeling nature 
in the act of reproduction teaches man sensitive¬ 
ness and shyness. Her processes are not blatant 
and advertised. She seeks retirement and peace, 
choosing the soft gloom of night for incubation 
and the twilight of evening or morning for par¬ 
turition. What respect should not man, the 
master of nature, the chief glory of earth, have 
for the womb that conceived and fashioned him, 
for the nest which nourished him! Yet he alone 
of all the reproductive forces drags his dignity 
into the mud by shameful excesses, or makes 
it ridiculous by his levity, or blasphemous by 
worshipping his animal passions. “ And I sent 
to you all my servants the prophets, rising early, 
and sending and saying: Do not commit this 
abominable thing which I hate. But they heard 
not, nor inclined their ear to turn from their 
evil ways, and not to sacrifice to strange gods.” 
—Jer. xliv. 4, 5. 

3. The unclean are forced by their human na¬ 
ture to explain, defend, and encourage their filth 


90 


THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 


and their excesses. They are not afraid to face 
the Christ, the sages of time, the decency of 
nature, the experience of ages, the scorn of the 
clean, with their lying apology. Where they 
do not cover their lives with the cloak of hypoc¬ 
risy, they raise a battlement of so-called religion, 
scientific theory, art, tradition, and custom, be¬ 
hind which to defend their rottenness and to 
propagate it. Their explanation is that nature, or 
God—for sometimes they affect belief in God— 
gave men their concupiscence for comfort’s sake, 
to enable them to bear with calmness the hard¬ 
ship of living; therefore they are privileged to 
use the sensual appetite at pleasure. For them 
the laws of society, the restraints of decency, 
the convention of marriage are insults to nature 
and to God! Their defence is that passion is 
too strong for man to overcome or to regulate, 
and so the general health of the animal suffers 
if passion be not indulged. It is amazing how 
this opinion has spread among Christians. In¬ 
dulgence is encouraged among the unclean by 
the teaching that, like any other appetite, it 
must be fed when it clamors for its food; that its 
exercise ennobles man’s nature and strength¬ 
ens his faculties; that life is not worth the liv¬ 
ing without its pleasures. Against such fic¬ 
tions Christ opposes His clear condemnations. 
“ Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall 
see God.”—Matt. v. 8. And the unclean shall 


THE PLAGUE OF UNCLEANNESS. 91 

not see Him. “ You have heard that it was said 
to them of old: Thou shalt not commit adul¬ 
tery. But I say to you that whosoever shall 
look on a woman to lust after her hath already 
committed adultery with her in his heart.”— 
Matt. v. 27, 28. Who judges the world, Christ 
or the lechers? They cry out against Him that 
there is no life to come wherein He will be the 
judge. But they have not been able to persuade 
mankind at any time to adopt their views and 
practices. Even the decent materialist refuses 
to sanction their filthy excesses. “He that 
loveth cleanness of heart, for the grace of his 
lips shall have the king for his friend.”—Prov. 
xxii. 11. 

II. Effects of Sensuality. 

1. Why do they not succeed in permanently 
poisoning the race? Because religion, reason, 
and experience are all against them. Men know 
that there is such a thing as a slavery of the 
passions, something more awful than the slavery 
of a man to a master. The miser is not unfa¬ 
miliar to men, and he is detestable and detested 
heartily. The drunkard and the opium-eater 
are common enough to make indulgence terrible 
to us. The gambler, ready to stake the uni¬ 
verse, his very soul, on a throw of the dice, to 
satisfy his infernal excitement, has a fascination 
for us. But no man seeks the slavery of drink, 


92 


THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 


opium, gold, or play for its own sake. All men 
dread the condition of what is so well named the 
“fiend.” There is no slave so low as the slave 
of sensuality. Men can often associate with the 
drunkard, the miser, the gamester, for humanity 
is slow in disappearing from such unfortunates. 
No man can associate with the slave of impurity. 
He is a leper, unclean, the representative of a 
plague. No house is safe into which he enters. 
He respects no ties of blood, hospitality, friend¬ 
ship, gratitude. He sweats impurity. He is 
the slave of his own dreams. His unconscious 
looks, gestures, actions, reek with the poison. 
He interprets life in all its manifestations by 
the key of pleasure. More than any other slave 
he is opposed to the spiritual life, because it 
means the deprivation of carnal joys in this life, 
and the pains of hell in the next. “ I have dealt 
with them according to their uncleanness and 
wickedness, and hid my face from them.”— 
Ezech. xxxix. 24. Even where his faith remains 
in some way unshaken, he gives up religious ex¬ 
ercises, keeps away from the sacraments, and re¬ 
fuses to pray. He fashions a hope for the future 
based on a Christianity of his own; nor can he 
persuade himself that the utterances of Christ 
and the Church against his pleasures are rightly 
explained. Of all slaves, this slave is deafest to 
the call of grace. 

2. The sins of the parents pass on to the third 


THE PLAGUE OF UNCLEANNESS. 


93 


generation. Whatever there may be in the mod¬ 
ern theory of heredity, it is undoubted that 
monstrous appetite in the parent increases appe¬ 
tite in the children. God and nature are re¬ 
venged on the sensual through the children he 
brings forth. It is instructive to watch the car¬ 
nal sinner in the training of his children. He 
has no desire that they shall tread the path of 
his youthful excesses. But he looks upon some 
indulgence for tho boys as necessary and proper, 
and is content with warning and advising them. 
Toward his girls he becomes simply ferocious 
in his care, and raises them in an exclusiveness 
which often turns out badly. Or, on the other 
hand, he is indifferent through that confidence 
which holds foolish parents with regard to their 
children, and never dreams of passion in connec¬ 
tion with them until their sins blaze before his 
eyes.' In either case he has done the work of 
preparation perfectly, by the teaching and ex¬ 
ample of years in society. Has he not taught 
the chief principles and practices of vileness 
everywhere, and illustrated them in his own life? 
Has he not infected every spot in which he 
stood with the plague? Has he not encouraged 
every evil influence working in its behalf? Then 
his children will be among the very earliest vic¬ 
tims of the plague. Their natural appetite, his 
own impulse to it, his doctrines, his training of 
tho children, will incline them promptly to sin. 


94 


THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 


Tigers do not breed lambs, and the dove is very 
rarely the offspring of the vulture, even in the 
ways of grace. The unclean have poisoned the 
air which their children must breathe, and 
the chances are, unless the grace of God inter¬ 
venes powerfully, that they shall live to see the 
children perish in the fatal air. “ Their vines 
are of the vineyard of Sodom, and of the sub¬ 
urbs of Gomorrah; their grapes are grapes of 
gall, and their suburbs most bitter. Their wine 
is the gall of dragons, and the venom of asps, 
which is incurable.”—Deut. xxxii. 32, 33. 

in. The Signs of Popular Degradation. 

1. The world is ever crowded with the un¬ 
clean, and no man has a right to cultivate indif¬ 
ference to the spread of the plague. Nothing 
should be taken for granted in dealing with it. 
Perhaps half the people of this land are without 
that religious training which is our only sure 
protection against uncleanness. One can under¬ 
stand, therefore, what a splendid harvest of mis¬ 
fortune awaits the nation at the critical turn in 
the lane of its history. The signs are already 
in the sky, lurid as the burning of distant cities. 
“ They have sinned against him, and are none of 
his children in their filth: they are a wicked 
and perverse generation. Deut. xxxii. 5. 

What is the meaning of the divorce court in 


THE PLAGUE OF UNCLEANNESS. 


95 


American life? Probably its like has not been 
seen in the world since the decadence of Borne, 
for downright scorn of public decency, of mar¬ 
riage, of virtue. Authorities are busy with ex¬ 
planations of it, but there is only one explana¬ 
tion—dirt. The singularity of it is that its laws 
should have received public sanction in a decent 
nation having some regard for Christianity. 
Who secured the passage of these laws, which 
make divorce and remarriage probably the sim¬ 
plest of legal processes? Surely not the decent 
legislators of the time. The work must have 
been done by the lecherous, or their relatives, 
who know the needs of abnormal sensuality. 
Who take advantage of these laws? Por the 
most part it must be the unclean, eager to whet 
their passions in new ways. The American di¬ 
vorce court is not the product of a decent pagan¬ 
ism, or of even a scandalous sectarianism, which 
denies the sacrament of matrimony, the institu¬ 
tion of Christ. It is the offspring of the mon¬ 
ster of sensuality, which devours the people of 
this land by millions. Why the clean tolerate 
the divorce court is inexplicable. But it shows 
clearly one evil force at work in the community, 
and it draws to our territory much of the general 
filth of the world. “ Shall I not visit for these 
things, saith the Lord? or shall not my soul 
take revenge on such a nation? ”—Jer. v. 29. 

2. What is the meaning of the unclean press? 


96 


THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 


God has thrown around the children the cloud 
of innocence, in which they walk without seeing 
or understanding impurity. Nature, which does 
not wish the youth to use his natural powers 
before the proper time or contrary to the way of 
right reason, grants to the young a beautiful 
natural chastity. This chastity resists long the 
allurements of the flesh. The guardians of in¬ 
fancy and youth do their utmost to preserve 
innocence to the last moment, to strengthen nat¬ 
ural chastity by every method known to nature 
and grace. Even the impure parent has no de¬ 
sire to hurry his child into the ways of sin. 
But the public press nullifies a great part of 
that good work. The care of God, of nature, of 
the parent is made vain by the stories of crime 
printed in detail in the daily journal, by the 
posters on the open street, by the books sold on 
the news-stands. Who controls the unclean 
press? Surely not the pure and upright. No; 
but the dabblers in tolerated uncleanness, the 
half-and-half Christians, the patched-up philos¬ 
ophers who swear by masters they do not under¬ 
stand, and a few high priests from the temples 
of Yenus. “How can I be merciful to thee? 
Thy children have forsaken me, and swear by 
them that are not gods: I fed them to the full, 
and they committed adultery, and rioted in the 
harlot’s house.”—Jer. v. 7. They change the 
hearts of the young from purity to uncleanness; 


THE PLAGUE OF UNCLEANNESS. 97 

they set before them examples of vileness, and 
add the obscene sneer and the silly laugh which 
show how lightly sin sits on their souls. They 
pave the way for the underground press, the 
panderer and the procurer, the agents of evil, 
whose name is legion, who not only enter into 
the swine which the journals provide, but seize 
upon innocence and purity by force and convert 
them into devils. 

3. All this astounds and frightens us. But 
what still more astounds and terrifies is the 
ignorance and indifference of parents to the 
conditions. It seems to be forgotten by these 
guardians of youth that nature is at work in 
their children, stirring up the appetite which 
some day is to be honorably used for the good 
of society and of the individual himself; that 
the young must be guarded and trained to con¬ 
trol that appetite, so as to use it properly and 
lawfully. Each parent seems to be convinced 
beforehand that no matter who falls into dissi¬ 
pation his particular offspring is secure against 
temptation and sin. Therefore the child is often 
ruthlessly exposed to contagion from his kind 
in schools where prudence and religion are 
known only by their absence. The daily jour¬ 
nals are introduced into the very household, 
and read by the little ones. A dangerous free¬ 
dom is permitted them in forming companion¬ 
ships. Their conduct abroad is not made the 
7 


98 THE chaplain’s sermons. 

subject of examination. It is forgotten that the 
agents of impurity are on every street recruiting 
for the houses of shame, and that their greatest 
success is found where parents are taking the 
virtue of their children for granted. As long as 
the boy or girl keeps up an exterior of refine¬ 
ment, of affection and respect, of religious ob¬ 
servance, no danger is apprehended. Yet all 
this time the evil work is sapping the life of 
the child’s soul. A catastrophe may open the 
eyes of the indifferent when it is too late. Or 
the climax may never be reached in the open. 
Only in after years the poor wrecks of passion, 
as they float miserably into the harbor of death, 
seeing how much their superiors might have 
saved them from, will accuse the father and 
mother bitterly of inexcusable neglect. And 
even where repentance and restoration have shed 
a clean glory over their closing days, they will 
not be able to hinder the thought that purity 
would have been the splendor of their lives had 
the guards of childhood and youth kept better 
watch at the gates against the enemy. “My 
days have passed away, my thoughts are dissi¬ 
pated, tormenting my heart. They have turned 
night into day, and after darkness I hope for 
light again. If I wait hell is my house, and I 
have made my bed in darkness. I have said to 
rottenness: Thou art my father; to worms, my 
mother and my sister. Where is now then 


L, ®f 0. 


THE PLAGUE OF UNCLEANNESS. 99 

my expectation, and who considereth my pa¬ 
tience? All that I have shall go down into the 
deepest pit: thinkest thou that there at least I 
shall have rest? ”—Job xvii. 11-16. 


£0e Grafton of ©rinft. 

Look not upon the wine when it is yellow , when the color 
thereof shineth in the glass: it goeth in pleasantly. But in 
the end it will bite like a snake , and will spread abroad 
poison like a basilisk.—Prov. xxiii. 31 , 32. 

OUTLINE. 

1. The magnitude of the temperance question in America 

surprises the students of our social life. 

2. It is not the excesses of the confirmed drunkard which 

make the question so important, but the steady and 
wasteful spending of the moderate drinker. 

3. The habit of drink has introduced a new form of slavery 

amongst us, the slavery of taxation. 

4. The steady drinker taxes the beauty, health, and vitality 

of his body into ugliness and disease. 

5. He taxes the powers of his mind until they fall below 

the commonplace, and with them fall his opportunities 
in life. 

6. He taxes his soul until faith, honor, virtue, sense of 

duty are worn to the vanishing-point. 

7. He taxes parent, wife, children, friends, home, and the 

Church and state, which he should help to support. 

8. He strengthens the powerful corporations of drink, which 

will not let him escape from slavery. 

9. And he dies only half conscious of his iniquity, ignorant 

that he had sold himself into slavery. 


I. The Hinge of the Temperance Question. 

1. Our temperance question is unknown in 
the European world, and few Europeans can 
grasp the condition which flourishes here. But 


THE TAXATION OF DRINK. 


101 


one has only to look at the annual drink-bill 
of the American people to feel that cancerous 
growths are already developing in the body pol¬ 
itic. It is pleasant to know that an industrious 
people have money to invest in recreation and 
in the simple luxuries of the poor. When one 
item, however, of the spendings for amusement 
runs into the hundreds of millions, and when 
these millions stand in great part not for the 
superfluities of the workers, but for their actual 
necessities, then sadness takes the place of joy. 
If we go on to say that the spending of these 
immense sums reduces the comforts of the poor, 
deprives thousands of many necessities, and 
sends the children through life limping, we have 
at once raised a grave question; and if we add 
that this waste increases the number of the sick, 
develops paupers, turns honest men into crim¬ 
inals, and thereby increases the expenses of the 
state, we have pointed out a condition which war¬ 
rants the ringing of alarm-bells and the call of 
our citizens to arms as if the plague had struck 
us in every quarter, or a foreign enemy had 
landed on our shores. The annual drink-bill of 
our people is $500,000,000. Not another word 
need be said. Behold the most eloquent tem¬ 
perance sermon ever preached! 

2. To understand that sermon in the very 
depths of the mind and the heart, it is not neces¬ 
sary to be an upholder or an advocate of total 


102 


THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 


abstinence; nor need the preacher and persuader 
recommend the taking of the pledge to all man¬ 
kind ; nor is it expedient to describe the drunk¬ 
ard and his progress to delirium tremens. The 
victim of hard drinking is only a highly colored 
illustration of the drink-habit. He convinces us 
only that we should never make hogs of our¬ 
selves. The firm grip of alcohol on him warns 
us against too free use of any drug. But the 
sight of him rarely goes beyond this dictum of 
common sense in its effects. For he does not 
adequately represent the real evil arising from 
heavy drinking. The so-called moderate drinker 
is the better illustration of the sad condition in¬ 
to which we have fallen—the respectable, hard¬ 
working, every-day citizen, whose steady drink¬ 
ing supports the distillers and brewers and their 
cunning distributors, the saloon-keepers, whose 
vote enables the liquor interest to practise all 
the tyrannies of irresponsible power, whose 
influence paralyzes the fighters of the liquor 
tyranny, and whose bad taste in drink hides 
from him the poisonous character and inferior 
quality of the liquids he consumes. The drunk¬ 
ards are few, but the steady drinkers are counted 
by tens of millions. They are of all grades of 
society, and their life-histories are full of in¬ 
struction. They are drinkers to the remotest 
generation; multiplied troubles pursue them 
in which drink consoles them; respectability is 


THE TAXATION OF DRINK. 


103 


tlieir hall-mark, and they keep their heads over 
the surface to the last; but disease, death, hard¬ 
ship, struggle make their lives a continuous 
walking along the precipice; and when they 
fall, “ they fall like Lucifer, never to rise again.” 
“ He that loveth good cheer shall be in want: he 
that loveth wine and fat things shall not be rich.” 
—Prov. xxi. 17. 

3. At once there is a protest from the regular 
drinkers against associating them with intem¬ 
perance. Let them be patient and hear this dis¬ 
course to the end. They are the guilty parties, 
not the drunkards, upon whose shoulders the 
entire infamy of the drink evil securely rests. 
Their habit of drinking has introduced a new 
form of slavery amongst us. The American 
mind has a horror of slavery of the African kind. 
It is not so ready to understand and detest the 
slavery of sin; nor is it any too quick to realize 
and begin the inevitable fight against the indus¬ 
trial slavery of our time. There are many forms 
of slavery, and the most terrible and hateful and 
destructive is that which is not suspected. The 
African slave is owned by a master, and his legal 
status is that of a chattel of a peculiar kind. 
Peculiar legislation in civilized countries secured 
for him the comforts and privileges of a human 
being, and natural feeling did much more in di¬ 
rect dealings of master and slave. Nevertheless 
he was a slave, who came and went at the bid- 


104 


THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 


ding of one man, who could be sold like a horse, 
and subjected to indignities. The industrial 
slaves of Europe are freemen, many of whom 
own the privilege of voting. But of what value 
is that freedom which one cannot use? The 
slave is tied to one condition by law; a freeman 
tied to one condition by various dishonorable 
circumstances is no more than a slave, though 
the law recognizes him as free; and such is the 
lot of thousands of freemen in Europe. So taxed 
are they by government, landlord, and poverty 
that they cannot stir from the locality in which 
they were born. Taxation can be made a form 
of slavery. The contention of this sermon is 
that the drink-habit has introduced a form of 
slavery by taxation. The drink-dealers are the 
owners of millions of slaves under the forms of 
freedom. Here is the hinge of the temperance 
question. In place of the traditional drunkard, 
whose career used to illustrate the evils of drink, 
behold the American slave. “ I have seen ser¬ 
vants upon horses, and princes walking on the 
ground as servants.”—Eccles. x. 7. 

II. The Taxation of Body, Mind, and Soul. 

1. No nation owns a finer boy than the young 
American at the age of twenty. Inclined to 
leanness, pale of countenance, active and grace¬ 
ful in manner, a good dresser, polite, full of 


THE TAXATION OF DRINK. 105 

energy, he is the type of youthful beauty and 
natural refinement. He may be of any race, the 
general appearance and character are much the 
same. His clear eye, fine skin, sweet and manly 
voice aro worth more than ordinary apprecia¬ 
tion. His home training as a rule has not been 
spoiled by the accidents of time. The whole 
world pauses to take a second lingering look at 
him. At the age of twenty, after the American 
fashion, he may be said to be on the threshold 
of the saloon. To that portal more than half 
the American boys must go at their majority. 
The current of youth sets that way, the door is 
always open, the lights and music are brilliant, 
and the city officials smooth the way by open 
encouragement or by driving off the opponents 
of the saloon into a persecuted obscurity. “ Be 
not in the feasts of great drinkers, nor in their 
revellings, who contribute flesh to eat: because 
they that give themselves to drinking, and that 
club together, shall be consumed; and drowsi¬ 
ness shall be clothed with rags.”—Prov. xxiii. 
20, 21. Ten years of drinking works a trans¬ 
formation in the American boy. His color is 
now high, his thin face slightly bloated, his lips 
thickened, his eyes muddy, his complexion 
coarse, his body fat, his breath bad, the odor 
from his body pronounced, his voice raspy, his 
grace and activity much diminished. What has 
happened? Heavy taxation of his physical or- 


106 


THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 


gans. One may surely call it heavy, since he 
has lost by it all the beauty of youth, and some 
of its vigor. He has put such a load on his 
stomach, liver, kidneys, and heart for ten years 
that they struggle, like the European slaves, 
merely to live. Trifles such as appearance, 
color, complexion, have no longer place in his 
struggle for life. But the man has not lost his 
respectability, his character, or his position. 
He is still the same honest and jolly fellow of 
ten years previous. “ A man to whom God hath 
given riches, and substance, and honor, and his 
soul wanteth nothing of all that he desireth.”— 
Eccles. vi. 2. 

2. We cannot be sure of that. He had a fine 
mind when he left school or college. He had 
perfect control of himself, and his natural appe¬ 
tites were in their proper place. He was full of 
ambition, alert for opportunities, able to see 
them when they rose in his way, energetic in 
seizing them. Men will tell you that he is the 
same at this moment; a doctor will tell you that 
he cannot be the same, if he has been tippling 
steadily for ten years. The edge of his talent 
and cleverness has been worn ofl. He has re¬ 
duced his energies more or less, and a shade of 
indolence, the laziness of the saloon and of alco¬ 
hol, has fallen on him. The mind is more slug¬ 
gish in its movement. He imagines it quicker 
because his experience enables him to do now 


THE TAXATION OF DRINK. 


107 


what he could not ten years ago; but though his 
experience has increased, the mind is not as 
alert, as quick, as successful in using that expe¬ 
rience as it would have been were it not steeped 
in alcohol. He misses opportunities, and every 
year he misses more. He has lost the calmness 
of the dispassionate youth. He has no longer 
control of his passions and appetites, for drink 
lets loose the little devil lurking in them. He 
is less pure, coarser, brutality shows in his tem¬ 
per, the fine balance of his clean youth has not 
been strengthened, but weakened and perhaps 
destroyed. Some unfortunates after a ten-years’ 
course of tippling find all the, passions let loose 
like a tempest, which rages through their whole 
lives afterward. Many simply dip into the 
pleasures suggested by heated imaginations. 
In either case the mind is disturbed, tossed 
about, and its natural acumen has vanished. In 
other words, to reduce what has been said to a 
single sentence, the young man has taxed his 
mind as he taxed his body. He has paid to his 
master, the tax-gatherer, not only the interest, 
but a goodly part of his fair capital. 

3. If that were only all! Poor lad, he has also 
laid a heavy tax on his soul. He might not have 
been the best of boys at twenty, so precocious 
are the young of these times. But the wicked¬ 
ness of youth lacks malice and habit, and the 
unconquerable innocence of the boy—unconquer- 


108 


THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 


able up to a certain age—keeps all indication of 
sin from bis face, showing bow lightly it has 
touched the soul. Fresh from home and school, 
he has a high standard of living and of associa¬ 
tion. His mother and his sisters are dear to 
him, his speech has always been clean, and his 
thoughts have not been uttered in the spirit of 
uncleanness. What a change in ten years! His 
thoughts, language, actions, companions, reek of 
the saloon. He has fallen, unconsciously per¬ 
haps, to its level. It may be the saloon of a pri¬ 
vate club or otherwise. He has fallen to its 
level. He had a beautiful faith ten years ago—- 
the faith of the young, which knows no tempta¬ 
tion, and reaches easily and lovingly to the 
throne of God. He has the faith still, but the 
practice of it does not trouble him. The drink- 
habit, which unchained the tempest of his pas¬ 
sions, has shaken the faith in him. If his 
mother could but see the history of his soul in 
those ten years, and he could read the misery of 
his condition in her sorrow, what a revelation it 
would be to him! It is the history of a struggle 
with degradation, up and down from dirt to 
grace, discouragement followed by excess, dis¬ 
gust succeeded by despair. He has taxed the 
powers of his soul, and the grace of Christ, to 
satisfy his appetite. What a pitiful all-round 
change in ten years: the beautiful boy fresh 
from his mother’s arms, and glorious in spiritual 


THE TAXATION OF DRINK. 109 

cleanness, converted into a drink-steeped sinner! 
“ Thv eyes shall behold strange women, and thy 
heart shall utter perverse things. And thou 
shalt be as one sleeping in the midst of the sea, 
and as a pilot fast asleep when the stern is lost. 
And thou shalt say: They have beaten me, but 
I was not sensible to pain: they drew me and 
I felt not: when shall I awake and find wine 
again? ”—Prov. xxiii. 33-35. 

III. The Slave-Drivers. 

1. Taxation once begun is difficult to shake 
off. We have seen what ten years of it did for 
the youth. The process continues throughout 
life, as we see from the annual drink-bill of the 
people; and the taxation increases out of propor¬ 
tion to the numbers, proving that the drinkers 
begin earlier, and drink more as time goes on. 
If the moderate could confine the taxation to 
themselves, the matter would be still hard 
enough; but they extend its withering influence 
over all dear to them. The average man earns 
no more than is needed to support his family 
decently. Wages and salary are rarely enough 
to provide anything for old age. Only with 
careful management will a father keep his home 
and train up his children usefully. Yet in mar¬ 
riage he never gives up the drinking habit of his 
youth, and the mystery is, where he gets the 


110 


THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 


money for the luxury. By taxing his wife, his 
children, his home, his friends, and his neigh¬ 
bors. It would be tedious to follow him in the 
diabolical process of stripping his own flesh and 
blood of the necessaries of life. His spending 
forces the wife to a miserable economy, a state 
of semi-starvation, which deprives her of all 
comfort in life. The struggle between want and 
honesty is too heavy. He taxes the clothes off 
her back, taxes her into hard labors and deep 
sadness, taxes her health and happiness. He 
taxes the children by depriving them of a hun¬ 
dred joys of childhood, by dressing them poorly, 
by feeding them lightly, by shortening their 
school-days, and by hurrying them to work; 
and then he taxes their wages, which he usually 
seizes, until they revolt against taxation and 
him. The bills are only partially paid, which 
is a taxation of his neighbors; he borrows from 
his friends; and too often the hospital has to 
take care of him and the home has to receive his 
children, for he has no savings to supply the 
needs of sickness. No millionaire could stand 
the taxation which this man has put upon him¬ 
self and his own for a lifetime. No government 
could endure a decade that taxed its people so 
fearfully. “Who hath woe? whose father hath 
woe? who hath contentions? who falls into pits? 
who hath wounds without cause? who hath red¬ 
ness of eyes? Surely they that pass their time 


THE TAXATION OF DRINK. Ill 

in wine, and study to drink off their cups.”— 
Prov. xxiii. 29, 30. 

2. But we have not yet reached the end of 
this wretchedness. This is the wretch who has 
fastened upon us the yoke of the saloon. He is 
a respectable voter, even religious if you will, 
and be believes in free access to the saloon. He 
has no use for total abstinence, temperance 
leagues, high license, or no license. There is no 
harm in drink, as his life proves. He has drunk 
deep since he was twenty, and he is living hearty 
and respectable to testify to its helpfulness. 
His children drink, and a finer family never 
drew breath. He will support the saloon, a 
public nuisance and a public danger as at pres¬ 
ent managed, the resort of the harlot, the breed¬ 
ing-place of fornicators, the home of foul lan¬ 
guage, the roost of unclean birds. Behind this 
saloon stand the liquor interest, the distillers 
and brewers, who take rank in power and 
iniquity with the worst of the robber barons 
of history. They provide the brains and the 
money by which their business shall be ex¬ 
tended. It is never to go down, but must in¬ 
crease from year to year until everything that 
can drink whiskey and beer is enabled to drink 
its fill from the earliest period of drinking to the 
last swallow of time; till the very animals of 
the hearth, even the sponges of the bathroom, 
shall be soaked to the limit with the poisons. 


112 THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 

The drink barons are working to that end. 
They are riveted on us, not merely by legisla¬ 
tures, or by the habits of the people, but chiefly 
by this devotee of drink. He will not permit 
their traffic to be restrained; hardly will he per¬ 
mit it to be examined and directed in his own 
interest, at least to secure pure liquors. “ How 
happeneth it, O Israel, that thou art in thy 
enemies’ land? Thou art grown old in a strange 
country, thou art defiled with the dead: thou art 
counted with them that go down to hell. Thou 
hast forsaken the fountain of wisdom: for if 
thou hadst walked in the way of God thou hadst 
surely dwelt in peace forever.”—Bar. iii. 10-13. 

3. Taxation has enslaved him and his to the 
lowest point of slavery—the depth in which the 
slave finds contentment in his serfdom; and he 
labors to bring all mankind into the same state. 
And through the long years which measure 
this easy descent into hell, no one is more 
persuaded than he of his own honorable and 
merry career. He tells himself that life has 
been for him of the jolliest kind. He has kept 
himself respectable; he has kept his faith, and 
attends church in his old age. It is an early 
old age, but that is to be expected from the jolli¬ 
est kind of living. His memories include a few 
periods of regrettable dissipation, but he has 
repented him of his sins. After all, he is going 
to die honorably; he is not a drunkard, and his 


THE TAXATION OF DRINK. 


113 


life proves the temperance agitators to be mere 
dreamers of bad dreams. He is satisfied. Poor 
victim! When the Judge places before him the 
account of his life—its lost time, neglected op¬ 
portunities, forgotten duties, enslaved wife and 
children, wasted graces—what surprise will keep 
him dumb! What a contrast will he make with 
the drunkard! This unfortunate played chief 
part in a fearful tragedy, and men gazed horror- 
stricken at its last scene. But the other played 
the part of a fool in a drama, whose chief ele¬ 
ment was delusion. “ But these also have been 
ignorant through wine, and through drunken¬ 
ness have erred: the priest and the prophet have 
been ignorant through drunkenness, they are 
swallowed up with wine, they have gone astray 
in drunkenness, they have not known him that 
seeth, they have been ignorant of judgment.”— 
Isa. xxviii. 7. 

8 


£aef ^ouyb of CQrizt 

There is no beauty in him , nor comeliness : and we have seen 
him , and there was no sightliness , that we should be desir¬ 
ous of him: despised and the most abject of men , a man of 
sorrows , and acquainted with infirmity; and his look was 
as it were hidden and despised , whereupon we esteemed 
him not. — Isa. liii. 2, 3. 

OUTLINE. 

1. The end comes to all things human, and every man must 

taste the bitterness of death; therefore the human career 
of Christ ended in sorrow. 

2. This natural sorrow was increased by the treason of Ju¬ 

das, who sat with the Master in the supper-room. 

3. The farewell of Christ to His disciples, and the world, is 

marked by that human pathos and deep sadness pecul¬ 
iar to the last moments of man. 

4. Jesus begins to die in the Garden of Gethsemane, where 

His human nature faints in the excess of its anguish. 

5. The vision of the treason which condemns Him to death 

in His youth, after His wonderful life among His own 
people, overwhelms Him. 

6. The continuance of that treason among succeeding gen¬ 

erations, in the loss of salvation for millions of His 
beloved children, brings on the bloody sweat. 

7. His claim to the kingship of Judea is met by the princes 

of the people with His enthronement on the hill of Cal¬ 
vary and the crowning with thorns. 

8. His court is made up of the mob, the soldiers of Rome, 

some members of the royal family, and sinners of note, 
who present their felicitations. 

9. And the Mother of the new King enjoys the privilege of 

seeing Him die in torment, and of receiving His body 
into her arms. 


THE LAST HOURS OF CHRIST. 


115 


I. The Last Supper. 

1. "'Who is the man that shall live and not 
see death? ”—Ps. lxxxviii. 49. " We all die, and 
like waters that return no more, we fall down in¬ 
to the earth.”—2 Kings xiv. 14. The end comes 
to all things human, and that end includes the 
bitterness of death. We pass out of life with 
the taste of the grave in our mouth. No man 
can escape that bitterness, which seasons every 
pleasure of life. Christ made no exception to 
the law of sin in His own favor, although He 
was the Sinless One. He came to bear our in¬ 
firmities, of which the saddest is death. When 
He sat down with His disciples to the Last 
Supper, His were the feelings of the man close 
to death, of the innocent condemned who sweats 
with thought of the gallows. We men give our 
Lord no credit for His natural anguish, because 
He was God, and could relieve Himself of it if 
He pleased. Neither do we give the warrior 
credit for his dread on the day of battle. It is 
his business to fight, and his calmness, his smil¬ 
ing exterior, are to us true expressions of his 
feelings; whereas he writhes with secret pain at 
the dread possibilities of the day. It is the 
penalty of our nature that we tremble, and 
Christ trembled—for was He not the sweet 
human Son of Mary? Por the last time He sits 
down in peace with His chosen friends. When 


116 


THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 


He rises it will be to go forth, not into the sweet 
country blessed by His feet, to the home of 
Bethany, to the companionship of Mother and 
friend, to bring joy to the suffering, to be adored 
by the people, but to shame, suffering, and 
death. What does a poor sufferer think of in 
such a moment? Of the days that are gone, 
happy youth—scenes that gain beauty by the 
contrast with death’s darkness. And Christ 
thought of humble Nazareth, and of the poor 
people, and of Joseph working without and of 
Mary busy in the house; of the sunshine in the 
hot streets, of the long cool nights and their 
restfulness, of His youth and His manhood—in 
fine, of thirty-three years of loveliness such as 
belongs only to the dreams of the divine. And 
it was all, all ended forever. How such an end¬ 
ing pierces the heart, when the last darkness 
begins to gather! “ Give glory to the Lord your 

God before it be dark, and before your feet 
stumble upon the dark mountains; you shall 
look for the light, and he will turn it into the 
shadow of death, and into darkness.”—Jer. xiii. 
16. 

2. The depth of man’s love for his own adds 
to the bitterness of dying. The Lord looked 
on the faces of His disciples, from John, the 
tender, innocent, loving youth, to Peter, rug¬ 
ged, stubborn as the rock, faithful, and weak. 
* Having loved his own who were in the world. 


THE LAST HOURS OF CHRIST. 117 

he loved them unto the end.”—John xiii. 1. 
We know what the love of the father is for his 
children; what must not have been the love of 
Christ for His faithful friends? He saw before¬ 
hand their desolation over His loss, their long 
years of struggle and sorrow and persecution, 
their glorious but none the less painful dying, 
—all to be endured without the comfort of His 
visible presence; and although He saw, too, their 
final triumph and happiness, like the human 
father leaving his little ones, His divine heart 
bled for them. No matter how the strength of 
God uplifts the heart of the servant in pain and 
death, the suffering is real and desolating. And 
these children were to suffer for His love, and 
for the sake of the souls whom He loved. Like 
children they sat around Him now, dreaming 
only of present comfort and future glory, speak¬ 
ing bravely of the misfortunes that seemed so 
distant, yet stood gibbering at the very door. 
What courage to know so much, to suffer so, 
and still to smile, to be calm, to advise, to con¬ 
ceal anguish that might frighten these timid 
children! But He could not conceal His pain 
at the sight of Judas. “When Jesus had said 
these things he was troubled in spirit; and he 
testified, and said: Amen, amen, I say to you, 
one of you shall betray me.”—John xiii. 21. 
Poor wretch! What harder word need be said 
of him than that he broke for a moment the 


118 THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 

courage of the Christ! Yet He would not be¬ 
tray Judas to his brethren, only secretly nam¬ 
ing him to John. He bore the traitor’s presence 
while He could; and when anguish reached its 
limit, He spoke to him: "That which thou 
dost, do quickly.”—Johnxiii. 27. “He there¬ 
fore having received the morsel, went out imme¬ 
diately. And it was night. ”—Ibid. 30. The lost 
child was gone forever. One can imagine with 
what eyes Jesus pierced the unfortunate as he 
passed out into the eternal night: thus has many 
a heartbroken father looked after the beloved 
son bent upon destruction. 

3. The moments pass until that instant when 
the farewell must be spoken. How terrible to 
the hearts of men is that word Farewell, uttered 
for the last time! At the bedside of the dying 
it is impossible to decide which face express¬ 
es the greater anguish—his whom death has 
stricken, hers who is now about to lose the 
very light of life. The sweet past, the blessed 
present, surge into the heart, the heart rises 
to the lips, but the lips dare not pronounce 
the word. Every feature of love’s countenance 
speaks wordless pain, utterances are wild and 
broken. There is no painting the face of a 
lonely mother, dying, surrounded by little chil¬ 
dren, who cannot understand that she is leav¬ 
ing them forever—she who could not bear to 
desert them for a moment. Thus stands Jesus 


THE LAST HOURS OF CHRIST. 119 

before His helpless disciples. He speaks of His 
coming woe, and they do not understand Him. 
He performs for them the little offices of love. 
He washes their feet. He assures them over 
and over that His going away will bring them no 
harm; that in a little while they shall see Him 
again; that He goes before only to prepare a 
place for them in heaven; that they must love 
one another and serve one another, even as He 
had served them; He gives them His peace, 
bids them ask the Father for all things in His 
name, and prays for them in such words as 
come only from a heart bursting with love; and 
He calls them endearing names: My little chil¬ 
dren, Mine own. The human heart of the Lord 
speaks so loud in this farewell that its tumultu¬ 
ous beating can be felt in the inspired page. 
And the last word being said, Jesus arises with 
the abruptness of grief, saying: Arise, let us go 
hence. 


II. The Garden of Gethsemane. 

1. Few souls are so strong that they can walk 
to their doom alone. Jesus takes with Him the 
disciples, and leads apart three of them, Peter 
and James and John, to witness His suffering 
and to comfort Him. Like children they fall 
asleep, and leave Him alone. The soft night of 
Judea enwraps Him, but the night of death 
presses on His soul. The vision of death is be- 


120 


THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 


fore Him—instant death under the harshest cir¬ 
cumstances. We shall know what that vision 
means when it comes to us with the physician’s 
declaration that life is leaving us. The mere 
act of dissolution is nothing compared with the 
anguish of dying. In ordinary pain, in times 
of passing trouble, we find intervals of distrac¬ 
tion and of relief. The coming of a friend, a 
pleasant sleep, a holiday by the sea, a success¬ 
ful enterprise act as anodynes, and hope lights 
up the darkest moment. But from all distrac¬ 
tions the dying come back to the bed of death. 
Hope is dead. The momentary forgetfulness 
yields to the ever-rising grief. The criminal 
laughs at a passing pleasantry, but the very 
laugh reminds him of the scaffold, and the laugh 
dies into a moan. O death, be speedy! is the 
cry of the dying. The vision of death is so bit¬ 
ter to the soul. Christ looked at it long on this 
night. Its details were lurid: the palaces of 
Caiphas, Pilate, Herod; the scourging, the 
crown of thorns, the walk to Calvary burdened 
by the cross, the long agony between earth and 
sky. He denied Himself the single consolation 
of His Mother’s presence. He stood alone be¬ 
fore the dread vision, with the sounds of ap¬ 
proaching enemies, who were to make the vision 
a reality, distinct in the silence. 

2. Constantly we have to repeat to ourselves 
that Christ was a man, and suffered His agony 


THE LAST HOURS OF CHRIST. 


121 


precisely as men suffer theirs. We have only 
to look into our own hearts to understand in 
part His suffering. When dying becomes part 
of a man’s daily life, while he is still able to 
move about with a clear head, his sufferings are 
manifold. The worn "and helpless invalid has 
little strength for thought. Christ standing 
alone in the garden was in perfect health and 
vigor. The vision of death came to him as to 
the soldier who leads a forlorn hope in the morn¬ 
ing. With it came the vision of treason which 
was to end His life early and miserably. Ac¬ 
cording to man He was a failure, since He came 
to His own people, and they were to reject Him, 
torture Him, and put Him to death. Death had 
come to Him in His youth, through the people 
whom He loved, for whom He had performed 
such wonders in pure love, and that death would 
fill them with delight. What anguish in the 
thought! But the results of that rejection of 
Him filled Him with deeper sorrow. “ For thus 
saith the Lord concerning the sons and daugh¬ 
ters that are born in this place, and concerning 
their mothers that bore them; and concerning 
their fathers, of whom they were born in this 
land: They shall die by the death of grievous 
illnesses; they shall not be lamented, and they 
shall not be buried, they shall be as dung upon 
the face of the earth; and they shall be con¬ 
sumed with the sword, and with famine; and 


122 THE chaplain’s sermons. 

their carcasses shall be meat for the fowls of the 
air, and for the beasts of the earth.”—Jer. xvi. 
3, 4. This was to be the fate of Jerusalem, 
famous slayer of the prophets, and now to take 
rank as a Deicide. He had wept over the beau¬ 
tiful and beloved city, which would not be saved. 
So Jeremias had wept over it, and John the 
Baptist in his prison. The vision of treason 
weighed down the soul of Christ. 

3. If His life was a failure as far as the Jews 
were concerned, it was also to be useless for 
thousands of souls in the years to come. “ This 
child has been set for the fall and resurrection 
of many in Israel,” said holy Simeon as he held 
the infant Jesus in his arms. We see the truth 
of the prophecy in the life around us. How 
sad, how depressing, how mysterious is the 
headlong rush of human beings into ruin! The 
wretches fished out of the rivers, the suicides 
gathered in from the haunts of shame, the dead 
sinners everywhere perishing in perfect indif¬ 
ference or despair, the hordes of criminals in 
prison and out of it who will sin to the last: 
who is not touched by the sight and the thought 
of them, remembering that they are the beloved 
children of loving households, which never fore¬ 
cast this end for their treasures? And if our 
cold hearts are touched, and our slow tears fall, 
what must not have been the sorrow of this 
lonely lover of His race, standing in the Garden, 


THE LAST HOURS OP CHRIST. 123 

and reviewing with the divine vision the long 
procession of His lost children! No wonder 
that He fell in a bloody sweat, and cried out 
for the chalice to pass from Him. “Surely he 
hath borne our infirmities, and carried our sor¬ 
rows ; and we have thought him as it were a 
leper, and as one struck by God and afflicted. 
But he was wounded for our iniquities, he was 
bruised for our sins.”—Isa. liii. 4, 5. 

III. Calvary. 

1. Pilate ordered His cause to be inscribed 
over His cross: Jesus Christ, King of the Jews. 
He had claimed to be the Messias, the great 
king of the Jewish nation, foretold for centuries. 
Therefore His people in mockery prepared for 
Him kingdom, throne, and court, and gave Him 
possession of them some hours before His dying. 
In the court of the Roman, then ruler of the 
world, maker of kings and nations, He was 
crowned with a crown of thorns, clothed with a 
purple robe, and honored with a sceptre of reed, 
amid the laughter, blows, and insults of the by¬ 
standers. Pilate presented Him to His people, 
as it were, in the name of his government; and 
His people promptly ordered Him to crucifixion. 
The procession of enthronement was formed, and 
set out from the city to the hill of Calvary, the 
new kingdom conferred upon the King. He 


124 


THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 


carried His throne upon His own shoulders, 
the rabble followed Him, and on the summit 
of the hill the ceremony of enthronement took 
place. He was nailed to the throne naked, and 
lifted into the air under the burning sun of Pal¬ 
estine. Was there ever before such a King and 
such a coming into His kingdom? “ And I was 
as a meek lamb that is carried to be a victim: 
and I knew not that they had devised counsels 
against me, saying: Let us put wood on his 
bread, and cut him off from the land of the liv¬ 
ing, and let his name be remembered no more.” 
—Jer. xi. 19. 

2. The court which attended this King was as 
strange as the kingdom. The majesty of Rome 
was represented by the centurion and his sol¬ 
diers, and its future faith by the conversion of 
this officer to the faith of Christ, when he saw 
what wonders were enacted on Calvary. The 
lightness of man had its illustration in the sol¬ 
diers throwing the dice for the garments of the 
King; and his despair and hardness of heart 
in the miserable death of the impenitent thief. 
Man’s hope found its expression in the simplic¬ 
ity and fervor of the good thief, his penitence in 
the weeping Magdalen, his innocence and fidel¬ 
ity in the youthful John. Near by were the 
faithful women, whose tears and lamentations 
had touched the heart of the King on the royal 
journey. And all about was the rabble which 


THE LAST HOURS OF CHRIST. 


125 


Christ called the world: the idle and curious 
come out to see men die in torture; the busy- 
officials and the busier peddlers who had work 
to do and money to earn; the frightened friends 
of Christ who did not dare to make themselves 
known; and the leaders of the conspiracy which 
had given this King so wonderfully to doom. 
They felicitated Him on His success in reach¬ 
ing the throne of His ambition, reminding Him 
that He had promised to rebuild the temple in 
three days, that He had saved many from death, 
and that He was the Son of God. Then they 
asked Him to prove His ability and His claims 
by saving Himself, or getting the help of His 
Father, or by exerting only a tithe of that power 
required to rebuild the temple in three days. 
As they passed the throne whereon He hung in 
silence, heads were wagged, tongues thrust out 
at Him, grimaces made. He alone held His 
peace, while the world displayed both its igno¬ 
rance and its ingratitude. Nature, which holds 
to its routine amid the tragedies of mankind, 
frightened away the baser courtiers, who fled to 
their homes when sun and moon withdrew their 
light and the earth heaved in distress. Only 
the faithful friends of the King and the soldiers 
on duty faced the gloom and the terrors of the 
day. 

3. Christ died on the cross, rejected of men, 
but His bitterest human torment was that He 


126 THE chaplain’s sermons. 

died in the heart of His Mother. Strong souls 
are able to bear their own sufferings with equa¬ 
nimity, but faint with despair before the anguish 
of their dearest. Jesus could endure His day 
of agony without one word of complaint, with¬ 
out a single demand for pity; and He could so 
far forget His own misery as to comfort the 
weeping women, turn the heart of Peter to his 
weakness, and even make a bid for the salvation 
of Pilate. But that His revered and beloved 
Mother should see Him die so terrible a death 
must have been the summit of His anguish. 
“ There stood by the cross of Jesus his mother.” 
In her presence He endured His death agony, 
and helpless to relieve she heard His last moan. 
“ Weeping she hath wept in the night, and her 
tears are on her cheeks.”—Lam. i. 2. The 
friends who took Him down from the cross could 
not but feel that His life was a failure. They 
had seen some of His miracles, and had enjoyed 
some of His sweetness. She had seen all, and 
enjoyed all; and of all that beauty and wonder 
there remained now only the prophecy of Sim¬ 
eon, "And thy own soul a sword shall pierce,” 
and the dead body of her Son. This was His 
gift to her on the day of His coronation: a death 
of shame. “ O all ye that pass by the way, at¬ 
tend, and see if there be any sorrow like to 
my sorrow.”—Lam. i. 12. What a spectacle for 
the Mother was this body lying in her arms! 


THE LAST HOURS OF CHRIST. 


127 


“ From the sole of the foot to the top of the head 
there is no soundness therein: wounds and 
bruises and swelling sores: they are not bound 
up, nor dressed, nor fomented with oil.”—Isa. 
i. 6. No writer has described for us the mutual 
anguish of the Son and the Mother. We know 
only from experience what unutterable woe 
stifled her throbbing heart as she walked in the 
procession to the tomb, saw the body laid away, 
and heard the grinding of the great stone as it 
closed up the tomb. 


Z$e (Risen CQriet 

Jesus came, and stood in the midst, and said to them: Peace 
be to you. And when he had said this, he showed them 
his hands and his side. The disciples therefore were 
glad, when they saw the Lord.—John xx. 19, 20. 

OUTLINE. 

1. The scene on the morning of Christ’s resurrection, when 

He re-entered the world as the victor over death. 

2. The exquisite human nature of the God-Man, in its 

blessed condition of immortality and impassibility, 
revives the reign of the innocent Adam on earth. 

3. The beauty, peace, and tranquillity of the human soul of 

Christ bring to the earth again the order and harmony 
of the garden of Paradise. 

4. Standing on the hill of Calvary, the risen Lord looks at 

the palaces of scheming Caiphas and corrupt Herod, 
and into those wicked hearts. 

5. He sees the palace of unfortunate Pilate, who preferred 

Csesar to Christ, only to lose both ; and the hovel which 
sheltered Barabbas, whom the Jews preferred to Christ. 

6. And in another quarter He looks upon the dead body of 

Judas swinging in the halter, and upon the bowed form 
of Peter weeping over his own infidelity. 

7. The wonders of this great scene are repeated in the 

present time, when the Christ of the Eucharist looks 
out upon the modern Jerusalem. 

8. He finds the characters of the resurrection morning mul¬ 

tiplied throughout the sleepy, indifferent world. 

9. Thus also will He find them on the morning of the great 

resurrection, when He looks from His throne of judg¬ 
ment upon the human race. 

I. The Morning of the Resurrection. 

1. Holy indignation is the feeling against the 
evangelists that their account of the resurrec- 


THE RISEN CHRIST. 


129 


tion of Christ should be so meagre. Yet this 
very meagreness allows us play for the imagina¬ 
tion in picturing to ourselves all that happened, 
from that august moment when life ran red 
again in the veins of Christ up to the solemn 
hour of His ascension. It is not so much the 
miracle of the dead body raised to life, for this 
wonder had been seen many times by His disci¬ 
ples ; nor yet the glory of the great resurrection 
which this miracle foretold for man; but rather 
the justice of this return to life of the innocent 
condemned, that attracts, charms, entrances us. 
The beauty of justice was never so brilliantly 
set forth as when this divine Victim of the 
greatest injustice within the capacity of man’s 
malice walked out of His tomb and stood on the 
scene of His supposed destruction. Only the an¬ 
gels saw Him, as He rose from death with the 
simplicity of God, to whom death, and life, and 
miracle are but sparks from the fire. He stood 
in the world once more, in the soft dawn; and 
the brutish world slept, while nature hushed 
itself in awe of this wonder of life and beauty 
that stood upon its bosom. Thought fails, 
words die in the mind, the imagination is par¬ 
alyzed before it. We murmur only the words 
of the inspired: “ He shone in his days as the 
morning star in the midst of a cloud, and as the 
moon at the full. And as the sun when it sliin- 
eth, so did he shine in the temple of God. And 
9 


130 


THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 


as the rainbow giving light in the bright clouds, 
and as the flower of roses in the days of the 
spring, and as the lilies that are on the brink of 
the water, and as the sweet smelling frankin¬ 
cense in the time of summer. As a bright fire, 
and frankincense burning in the fire. As a 
massy vessel of gold, adorned with every pre¬ 
cious stone. As an olive tree budding forth, 
and a cypress tree rearing itself on high, when 
he put on the robe of glory, and was clothed with 
the perfection of power.”—Ecclus. 1. 6-11. 

2. Since creation the poor earth had not wit¬ 
nessed such a spectacle as this Man walking 
up from the Garden to the summit of Calvary. 
When Adam came from the hand of God he was 
brother to this Christ in innocence; but from 
his fall till now earth had not felt the tread of 
the sinless foot, immortal and divine. The body 
of Christ born of Mary was a human body, 
capable of suffering, of change, of receiving 
injury, and had passed through the ordeal of a 
terrible death; but the body of the risen Christ 
was a more exquisite thing, no longer of earth, 
endowed with celestial power and beauty. Its 
odor was of heaven, its grace of eternity. It 
was as a rich garment interwoven with gold, 
needing only the light of heaven to blaze with 
majesty. No wound, no insult, was ever to 
reach it again. It remained visible and pal¬ 
pable, yet air and light were no longer the nec- 


THE RISEN CHRIST. 


131 


essary means of seeing it. Caiphas might have 
looked in the space which Christ occupied and 
have seen nothing. Pride and other sin could 
not reach with a telescope the beauty of the 
risen Christ, who yet was visible to the lowest 
of His disciples. This beautiful body was inde¬ 
pendent of all conditions of space and time. 
And still it was the body of Mary’s Son, human, 
palpitating, luminous with life, and love, and 
joy: “ One like to the Son of Man, clothed with 
a garment down to the feet, and girt about the 
paps with a golden girdle. And his head and 
his hairs were white, as white-wool and as snow, 
and his eyes were as a flame of fire, and his feet 
like unto fine brass, as in a burning furnace. 
And his voice as the sound of many waters. 
And he had in his right hand seven stars. And 
from his mouth came out a sharp two-edged 
sword: and his face was as the sun shineth in 
his power. And when I had seen him I fell at 
his feet as dead. And he laid his right hand 
upon me saying: Fear not. I am the first and 
the last, and alive and was dead, and behold I 
am living for ever and ever, and have the keys 
of death and hell.”—Apoc. i. 13-18. 

3. How much sadness, misery, despair, de¬ 
pression, turbulence have torn the hearts of men 
since the expulsion of Adam and Eve from their 
garden of peace and order! The Son of God 
and His sinless Mother did not escape a share 


132 THE chaplain’s sermons. 

in the common distress. At that moment the 
poor Mother lay sleepless under the terrible 
spell of her Son’s last hours of agony. The 
fathers tell us that the vision of Him at the in¬ 
stant of His rising brought relief to her suffer¬ 
ing, and an ecstasy which closed the seared eyes 
in heavenly sleep. “ Blessed are they that saw 
thee, and were honored with thy friendship.”— 
Ecclus. xlviii. 11. “Blessed and holy is he 
that hath part in the first resurrection.”—Apoc. 
xx. 6. The soul of Jesus was now clothed with 
immortal calmness. Perfect joy reigned there, 
and no tempest of feeling could evermore ruffle 
its shining bosom. At least one human being 
on that morning was in harmony with itself and 
with God. It was a repetition of the first morn¬ 
ing in Paradise when Adam sang hymns of joy 
to the Creator. The human race was once more 
brought into perfect harmony with its own na¬ 
ture and destiny through this descendant of 
Adam. The peaks of the mountains were no 
longer remote from heaven, but touched the bor¬ 
ders of the celestial world. Christ had raised 
man up and brought heaven down. Who saw 
this wondrous creature on that wondrous morn¬ 
ing, as He looked upon the scene of His pas¬ 
sion? Perhaps some ragged wanderer, some 
lost child, some simple heart, worthier of the 
sight than apostle or monarch, looked upon 
Him “ from whose face the earth and heaven fled 


THE RISEN CHRIST. 


133 


away, and there was no place found for them.” 
—Apoc. xx. 11. “And he was clothed with a 
garment sprinkled with blood: and his name is 
called, the Word of God.”—Apoc. xix. 13. 

II. The City of Jerusalem. 

1. We can imagine that the Lord walked to 
the summit of Calvary and gazed upon the va¬ 
cant crosses, then on the city, sleeping, indiffer¬ 
ent, satisfied with its crimes because great gain 
had come from them. There is nothing more 
terrible in our nature than the limitations which 
hide from us a scene like this: nothing more 
frightful in history than this spectacle of the 
risen Christ looking across from the hill of doom 
to the city of doom. The citizens are sleeping, 
the powerful city is in the heavy sleep of the last 
hours of night, the laborer and the exhausted 
sinner are as men dead: while the greatest won¬ 
der of history is taking place at the gates of 
the city. And there is no one to see, to spread 
the news, to praise God in behalf of men. 
“ Alas ! alas! that great city, which was clothed 
with fine linen and purple and scarlet, and was 
gilt with gold and precious stones and pearls.” 
—Apoc. xviii. 16. Surely the eyes of Christ 
must have disturbed in his sleep the ambitious 
Caiphas, as he tossed on his couch and assured 
himself that the death of “ this usurper ” had 


134 


THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 


saved Israel to him and his family for many 
years. Were not his guards all about that tomb 
which carried the seal of Roman power? But 
this was the fatal day, the third day, when the 
Christ of Galilee would rise again, according to 
His own prophecy! Poor wretch! Faithless 
priest! Type of all the faithless leaders of men! 
Thy restless thought, thy wide-open eyes, the 
scorn of sleep for thy pillow this night, are 
omens of thy future rather than the straining of 
unsettled nerves. The shadow of the Crucified 
rests on thee and thine forever. “ And the false 
prophet shall be tormented day and night for 
ever.”—Apoc. xx. 10. So also with the false 
king who slept his debauch away in the palace 
of the Herods. It was in his power to have 
saved two great souls, the Christ and His pre¬ 
cursor. Poor wretch! Despicable! Type of 
meanness and dirt and weakness crowned! It 
is the punishment of Caiphas to be coupled with 
thee: and thy punishment not to have known 
enough to recognize the sun when it shone upon 
thee. “ There is an evil that I have seen under 
the sun, as it were by an error proceeding from 
the face of the prince: a fool set in high dignity, 
and the rich sitting beneath.”—Eccles. x. 5, 6. 

2. The palace of Pilate rose proudly before 
the eyes of Christ. Surely the power of those 
eyes broke down the shaken wall of the Roman’s 
indifference. Had all the circumstances of the 


THB RISEN CHRIST. 


135 


trial, all the reports that followed it, the impres¬ 
sion made by “ this just man ” on the governor 
and his wife, faded away? We have no evidence 
to prove any further interest on the part of 
Pilate in his victim. He had his career to make 
sure, and the priests had threatened him with 
Caesar. One would think that secretly he might 
have followed up the Crucified to see how many 
further wonders appeared in His life. That he 
did not is proof how thoroughly the selfish can 
blind themselves to their own interest by utter 
devotion to that interest. He sleeps now secure 
of Caesar for the moment, and a greater than 
Caesar gazes on his heart from that hill which he 
thought led, though disagreeably, to final suc¬ 
cess. “He is troubled in the vision of his 
heart, as if he had escaped in the day of battle.” 
—Ecclus. xl. 7. It is his punishment, too, that 
he made a friend of a fool, and tripped meanly 
before a knave, by his halting treatment of the 
Man whom he desired to judge honestly. And 
in the slums beneath his palace the robber is 
sleeping, Barabbas, admired among men that he 
should be preferred to the Son of God. Prob¬ 
ably he lay that night in one of his favorite dens, 
hilarious with joy and bad wine, dreaming of 
future robberies and base pleasures; yet not 
near so base in his degradation as Caiphas, 
Herod, and Pilate; for he had done nothing 
against the Son of God, while they should have 


136 


THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 


been able and eager to recognize divinity, or at 
least to protect innocence. They had proved to 
the robber how easily the innocent are destroyed 
and the unjust protected through the meanness 
of princes, and so encouraged him to renew his 
evil ways. 

3. Not far from where Barabbas lay, the calm 
eyes of the risen Christ saw the bowed form of 
a timid friend, Peter, the courageous and un¬ 
faithful, all things in a moment, in a frenzy 
wounding Malthus, fearlessly entering the pal¬ 
ace, timidly denying the Lord, weeping like 
Magdalen, first to brave the terrors of the open 
tomb. He looked with love upon him, for this 
was His rock, in spite of all human weakness; 
this was the foundation upon which the Church 
was to be built—the strong, loving nature, with 
high ideals, stubborn to madness, never knowing 
defeat, and needing only the grace of the Spirit 
to become the impregnable fortress of the faith. 
He was weeping now, but the light of Christ’s 
love shone upon these tears and made them 
beautiful. Here was hope. But in the field of 
the potter lay a dead and rejected apostle, on 
whose face still rested undried the tears of de¬ 
spair. The look of Christ rests upon him also, 
but a different gaze from that yearning glance 
which followed Judas in his flight from the hall 
of the last supper. After the death of the Son 
of God, after the piteous fall of Adam, no other 


THE RISEN CHRIST. 


137 


tragedy of human life can possess such bitter¬ 
ness as this of Judas. Called to the highest, he 
fell into the abyss of Satan, repeating on earth 
the treason of heaven. He slept now the sleep 
of eternal despair, and all about slept the wearied 
multitude with the Beautiful Christ gazing upon 
them from Calvary's hill. “ Before him there 
were none so beautiful, even from the begin¬ 
ning.”—Ecclus. xlv. 15. “His remembrance 
shall be sweet as honey in every mouth, and as 
music at a banquet of wine.”—Ecclus. xlix. 2. 

III. The Modern Jerusalem. 

1. It is an old saying that history repeats 
itself in the course of time. Strangely beauti¬ 
ful and terrible as were the scene and the char¬ 
acters of the resurrection morning, each genera¬ 
tion since that time has beheld its repetition 
with every Easter dawn. Behold on every altar 
the Christ of the Resurrection, and around 
Him the selfish, indifferent, sleeping world. For 
three years He had illumined Judea with His 
teaching, His miracles, His love; until all men 
talked of Him, and brought their sick to Him, 
and went home rejoicing in Him. For nineteen 
centuries He has lived on our altars in the sight 
of the whole world, working wonders that attract 
the attention and hold the interest of all classes 
of men. He stood on the hill of Calvary alone 


138 


THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 


and unseen: He has stood here seen and known. 
The great Church, the everlasting throne of 
Peter, the shrines and sanctuaries of the civ¬ 
ilized world, the arts employed in decorating 
them, the sanctification of the millions that have 
worshipped Him, the wonders of holiness bloom¬ 
ing among them, have all been His work. No 
one denies it; all admire it. But more indiffer¬ 
ent than the people who accepted His favors and 
saw Him crucified with little regret, the modern 
witnesses of His glory dispute in His divine 
presence whether He ever existed. As He stood 
looking at the city of Jerusalem the first Easter 
morning, so does He stand to-day calmly won¬ 
dering at the children of men: so great and yet 
so little—great in their own conceit, little in 
their richest achievement. With their eyes full 
upon the Christ they cannot see Him. “ There 
is no remembrance of former things: nor indeed 
of those things which hereafter are to come: 
nor shall there be any remembrance with them 
that shall be in the latter end.”—Eccles. i. 11. 
“ A generation that are pure in their own eyes, 
and yet are not washed from their filthiness.”— 
Prov. xxx. 13. 

2. The world sleeps in the presence of the 
Christ because it desires not to know Him, and 
the heaviest sleepers are those who play the 
parts of Caiphas, Herod, and Pilate. At this 
moment the earth is full of the unscrupulous 


THE RISEN CHRIST. 


139 


priests of heresy, quite ready to crucify the 
Christ of the Eucharist. Luther played the role 
of Caiphas with terribly splendid results, and 
enjoyed the crucifixion when the worst of it was 
over; as Arius played it before him, and Cran- 
mer after him, for the sake of such honors as 
went with the treason. These are the illustrious 
examples; but who shall name the secret thou¬ 
sands who have even envied these arch-villains 
their wretched opportunity ? Herod has had a 
thousand imitators in his meanness among the 
little and dirty great ones of the world; as in 
the case of numberless princes who thought the 
Christ was a passing charlatan, and sold Him, 
or mocked Him, as suited their lazy fancy; the 
nobles of many races in all times who were first 
to adopt error if it gave them profit or advance¬ 
ment, and who would rejoice at a daily oppor¬ 
tunity so rich in revenue as the beheading of a 
John the Baptist or the crucifying of a Messias. 
Pilate would find a goodly company of his kind 
among the rulers of men, and would not need to 
blush for his following; nor would they need 
to fear comparison with their master. As for 
Judases, history provides such examples as Ju¬ 
lian the Apostate and Henry VIII. of England. 
They are all present—the rabble, the soldiers, 
the faithful friends, the centurion, the weeping 
women, Barabbas, and Peter. But now Peter 
is no longer weeping: he is the rock against 


140 THE CHAPLAIN’S SERMONS. 

which time and Satan dash themselves in vain. 
The modern Jerusalem is like the old. “ How 
is the faithful city, that was full of judgment, 
become a harlot? justice dwelt in it, but now 
murderers. Thy silver is turned into dross: thy 
wine is mingled with water. Thy princes are 
faithless, companions of thieves: they all love 
bribes, they run after rewards.”—Isa. i. 21-23. 

3. As it was on the first day of the week, as it 
is now, so shall it be on the morning of the gen¬ 
eral resurrection, when the human race stands 
before its King for the judgment of justice: with 
this exception, that all dissimulation and igno¬ 
rance shall then be laid aside. Herod and Cai- 
phas and Pilate will know their Judge and them¬ 
selves to perfection. “ And they cast dust upon 
their heads, and cried, weeping and mourning, 
saying: Alas! alas! that great city, wherein all 
were made rich, that had ships at sea, by reason 
of her prices: for in one hour she is made deso¬ 
late.”—Apoc. xviii. 19. The Christ that stood 
on Calvary in the silent dawn, the Christ that 
stood on the altars of men for centuries—the 
same Christ will preside at the judgment, and 
not a soul but will be able to recognize Him in 
joy or in terror. “ And his eyes were as a flame 
of fire, and on his head were many diadems, and 
he had a name written, which no man knoweth 
but himself. And he was clothed with a gar¬ 
ment sprinkled with blood: and his name is 


THE RISEN CHRIST. 


141 


called, the Word of God.”—Apoc. xix. 12, 13. 
All men have some fear of this last terror in 
their hearts, but they employ the successes of 
life, or the very despair of life, to drive it from 
their hearts; and they pay honor to the men of 
learning who can reason away the vision of fu¬ 
ture justice. Nevertheless the vision remains, 
and the prophets cry in the streets of Jerusalem, 
and each generation puts them to death or kills 
them with indifference. “ For I testify to every 
one that heareth the words of the prophecy of 
this book: If any man shall add to these things 
God shall add to him the plagues written in this 
book. And if any man shall take away from 
the words of the book of this prophecy, God 
shall take away his part out of the book of life.” 
•—Apoc. xxii. 18. 










































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































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